I’ve been working with Common Ground for close to 5 years now and the time has finally come for a much needed redesign. The new site is built on the Joomla content management system and features online ticket sales through Event Brite, a re-imagined events calendar, and a completely overhauled navigational hierarchy. One of the nice things about doing a redesign for an existing client is that I intimately understood many of the problems the old site was facing. I built it. Their problems were my my problems. Working together with them over the past several months has been an incredibly rewarding experience.
Over the years I’ve come to realize that E-Commerce is something best left to a separate e-commerce platform as opposed to using a third-party extension that gets tacked onto whatever CMS you happen to have decided on for content. The old site had an E-Commerce component built in ViruteMart and, if you’ve never used it… keep it that way. For a small non-profit using an e-commerce platform primarily for ticket sales, the switch to Event Brite couldn’t make more sense. First, it’s built for tickets. Most e-commerce platforms are built to ship products so if you want to build a ticket registration site you’ve got to cut out a ton of bulky features and code you’re never going to use. Event Brite made that incredibly simple.
The events calendar used to be a traditional grid-view you’d expect to find nailed to the wall in somebody’s kitchen. While this makes for a great presentation layer as far as differentiating between days goes it hardly provides any room to write about the events themselves. Clicking through to a description page is fine, but when the title of the event doesn’t fit into the tiny calendar square the time has come for change. We’ve opted to use a list-view organized by month. This lets us fit much more information about a single event onto the main calendar view. This is important because nobody is going to click on a tiny square to read more if they aren’t first convinced that doing so would be beneficial to them.
At any rate, check out the new site. If you’re in the Cleveland area, Common Ground is a great organization who run a lot of great programs for both kids and adults alike.
