Graphic Artists Guild CMS.

This case study was written with an intended audience of web and graphic designers, developers and anyone interested how the new graphicartistsguild.org website was built. It was published with the permission of the Graphic Artists Guild. If you have any questions, please feel free to email us at info@isimple.net.

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Background

As a membership organization consisting of several thousand graphic artists, the Graphic Artists' Guild website plays no small part in the organization's operations.

An RFP was sent to the Guild's membership and out of the many responses, the Guild selected designer Benjamin Lovejoy in partnership with Internet Simplicity as the back-end development team.

Business Goals:

Starting even before the proposal was written, high-level needs were assessed. The Guild's committee knew they needed certain functions to be performed by the site. Specifically, it needed to:

• Provide a means for members to communicate and collaborate with each other.
• Encourage and facilitate new memberships
• Promote the Guild's handbook. "Graphic Artists Guild Handbook: Pricing and Ethical Guidelines"
• Provide additional exposure for members.
• Provide a way for the Guild to post members-only information
• Synchronize with their member database (managed in FileMaker).

Design Collaboration:

The creative process of this development was managed entirely by Benjamin Lovejoy. Internet Simplicity would frequently weigh in on ways of implementing solutions, information architecture and other aspects of the system. Photoshop designs were provided for the various template types that comprise the website, and Internet Simplicity then implemented all coding necessary to complete the project.

Architectural Objectives:

When choosing the platform and method for building this site, these factors were assessed:

• At its core, the site was a heiricically organized collection of pages.
• Some pages were for members only.
• There needed to be a community forum.
• A site administrator needed to be able to post news items which would archive over time.

There were two user types:

• A graphic artists guild member who could participate in community discussions and access members-only pages.
• A website admin who would add / edit and delete content from the website.

Website Components:

CMS: At the heart of the website is a Content Management System (CMS) that was built specifically for creative professionals: TypeRoom Professional. Here are some of the unique attributes of this system and why the Graphic Artists Guild selected it...

• It is easy to use and provides for simple, "what-you-see-is-what-you-get" style editing.
• It is a flexible system and has virtually no design restrictions.
• It works well with hierarchically organized websites (vs. chronologically organized such as a blog).
• It can be extended to integrate with other tools and plugins
• It was developed and is supported by a team with experience in partnerships with graphic artists (us!)

News System: Because news-based content is better managed in a chronological fashion rather than hierarchically, a news plugin was integrated and customized which allows for the structured posting of news articles. It also automatically crops and formats uploaded images to be perfectly sized for the news formatting, archives news (good for SEO), and generates an RSS feed of recent news postings so subscribers can stay instantly up to date with Guild news.

Community Forum: The community forum was built with the light-weight and user-friendly PunBB. The forum provides not only the means to collaborate between the members, but since it already includes members profiles, this (with a few modifications) was used as the central data repository for member data. Members could then easily manage their own profile data (including username and password) through the PunBB profile interface.

Password Protected Pages: A custom plugin was created for TypeRoom Professional that detected whether the current view is logged into the community forum. If they were, this meant that they were a member and they could view the content on this page. In this way, the community forum profile was carried throughout the site as a whole.

FIleMaker Synchronization: The Guild's FileMaker data was synchronized with the member data through the use of a CSV export and upload from FileMaker.

Development Sequence:

1. Strategy and Planning: Strategy and planning was done both during the proposal phase and in the early stage planning meetings.
2. Visual Design: The creative process was led by Benjamin Lovejoy after the strategy was put into place.
3. Front-End HTML/CSS Programming: Following completion of the visual design, the necessary design files (given as Photoshop files) were given to Internet Simplicity.
4. Back-end development: Concurrent to the front-end development, the database and custom back-end development components were written in PHP and mySQL, using the TypeRoom Professional CMS and PunBB as foundational elements.
5. Iterations and Testing: After the site was complete, testing was done both internally and with the Guild.
6. Deployment: Once all testing was complete, the website was deployed.

Conclusion:

The finished product can be viewed at http://www.graphicartistsguild.org/ Below is a testimonial regarding the content management system and platform:

"As an artists advocacy organization, we need to be able to frequently update our website. The CMS is easy to learn and logical to use. TypeRoom Professional gives us the flexibility to manage our site on our own—without looking like a pre-packaged website-in-a-box."