Website Redesign Project: Creating Intuitive Content Managment

Abstract

Our client, Christine Link-Owens, is the president of the non-profit Giles Animal Rescue, which helps homeless, neglected, and abused pets in Giles County. The organization has a Drupal website, www.GilesAnimalRescue.org, that several groups of students have worked on, but it still needed bug fixes and feature expansion. Our goal was to make all the changes she asked for, as well as create a website content management environment that is easy to maintain, as well as thorough instructions of common tasks.

Many of our changes to the site were text formatting issues and adding images to pages, but also include: • Updated the version of Drupal to resolve security issues • Added pictures to many of the pages to showcase work of Giles Animal Rescue and its volunteers • Added the ability to enlarge images by clicking on them • Enabled gallery formatting to create image slide shows • Changed settings in Drupal to make adding and editing content easy, by creating tailored content types with specific fields • Resolved text formatting issues by making Filtered HTML default on all text content boxes • Accessed newsletter subscribers • Created a separate tab for Giles County Animal Shelter for information about the shelter

Additionally, we migrated hosting from Go Daddy to Bluehost. While updating the Drupal core when hosted at Go Daddy, we experienced many technical difficulties including limited control of our files and difficult menus for tasking such as backups. We moved to BlueHost because we were able to find an organization, GrassRoots, which offers free webhosting through BlueHost. Bluehost has a very intuitive cPanel that displays all the options on one page to help navigate through the website with ease.

Overall, our client has been very pleased with our changes and is excited about the future of her website. We feel that we have put forth our best effort over the course of this semester. We are proud to have assisted such a great organization that helps save unfortunate animals. We hope that our changes will aid them with their mission.