RI Health Center Association
- Category: Web design
- Industry: Healthcare
- Responsibilities: Design, XHTML and CSS page builds and templates
- Launched: June 5, 2009
- View This Project: www.rihca.org
Project Summary
The Rhode Island Health Center Association supports community health centers in the Ocean State as they forward their mission of providing affordable, comprehensive healthcare to all Rhode Islanders. To help in these worthwhile efforts and to give them a stronger presence online, the organization contacted Envision Technology Advisors about redesigning their website in late 2008.
One of the challenges identified early on for this project was the disparity between RIHCA’s target audiences for the new site. The site needed to be a resource that could be used by the organization members (the local community health centers) as well as policy makers and other professionals. It also, however, needed to act as a resource for the members of the community who are served by the health centers. The difference in the typical education level and technical savvy between these target groups was something we knew we had to address effectively for the site to be worthwhile.
The main branding area on the homepage was designed to target the community members who would be looking for the health centers themselves. The large “Do you need healthcare?” messaging, and the path that we decided to drive users down if they clicked that button, was created to drive these users to their local community health center where they could get the care or information they needed.
The rest of the site was populated with content provided by RIHCA detailing public policy, employment opportunities and specific information about RIHCA itself and the health centers in Rhode Island - making for a very content rich site with a fully realized sitemap.
This public facing site actually represents the first phase of Envision’s project with RIHCA. To accommodate the needs of the organization’s members, we are also creating a member’s area that is to be powered by SharePoint, to act as a sort of Intranet for RIHCA and their member health centers. That members area will be part of the second phase of the project, which began as this first phase was wrapping up.
Like all projects at Envision, the Rhode Island Health Center Association’s new website was a team effort. I provided the overall design of the site as well as all the CSS and XHTML templates for the site. The map on the lower portion of the homepage was taken from another design that was presented to the client (designed by fellow Envision designer, Jeremy Spurr) and that map, and the branding area on the homepage, were made functional and animated using JQuery by another of Envision’s designers. Once the site was fully populated and built, it was turned over to our development team and converted into .NET by Envision’s development team. This .NET platform will allow us the scalability for future functionality, including making the calendar of events and the job board on the site fully dynamic using the forthcoming members area to administer these resources.
You can check out the new site at www.rihca.org to learn more about the organization and their mission.