Portfolio

Mercedes-Benz Club of America

Rick Nashleanas — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 19:10:42 +0000

The members of the Mercedes-Benz Club of America (MBCA) are long-time enthusiasts of the best known premium automobile in the world... And their site, both in design and content, needed to represent that history, quality and pride of both the brand and the club.

Through an extensive branding study conducted by a third party, the MBCA embarked on a long-term effort to increase the visibility of the club and quality of its branding in order to expand its membership to a broader audience. Central to that marketing initiative was a new web site that emphasized online social interaction to a new generation of Mercedes-Benz owners.

Monarch Digital designed and developed an extensive web site and web application for a variety of audiences served by the club:

Visitors: Through a compelling design and compelling content, visitors find the attractive site a portal to a wide range of online information and personal contacts with existing club membership. Visitors can quickly create a guest account to participate in the forums without being a member of the club.

New Members: The new web site makes it easy to quickly join the club to fully participate in the community. The site demonstrates the value of membership through a wide variety of member benefits, testimonials and valuable online information about all makes and models of Mercedes-Benz.

Existing Members: Current club members can log in to submit local and national news articles, publicize events, read the award-winning Star Magazine online, place free online classified ads and get access to exclusive club resources. With the new site, the club can more easily stay in touch with members, members can dynamically update their membership profile online and they can easily renew their membership 24/7.

Star Magazine: For many members, the Star Magazine is the most important benefit of membership. The Star Magazine is the definitive source of news and events surrounding the Mercedes-Benz brand in the US and internationally. The MBCA web site brings the valuable content from the magazine online in several ways. Directly in the website, the pages of the Star Magazine come alive, published in an attractive web format. On each Star Magazine page, members and visitors alike can browse an interactive edition of the magazine provided by their publisher. Members receive complete access to the entire magazine while visitors receive selected feature articles.

Membership: Until Monarch developed the new MBCA site, the club maintained its member records on a customized Filemaker database on their local area network. Only National Business Office (NBO) staff onsite could update member information. Monarch converted the entire membership database into an online membership database, allowing members to update their own member profile information, manage their membership and have a single login for all club information.

Forum Community: For years, the club had a forum completely separate from the MBCA web site. To bring the community together on a single site, Monarch imported the MBCA vBulletin forum and merged the membership of the MBCA and the forums into a single login.

Local Sections. The 80+ local sections are the backbone of the club, organizing engaging events and providing one-on-one fellowship with other Mercedes-Benz enthusiasts. When a new member joins the club, the site automatically assigns the new member into the appropriate section based upon their zip code. Local section members can post their events and news articles for the entire membership and anyone visiting the site. Each section is featured on the national MBCA site and all officers can be contacted by visitors to learn more about that section.

Member to Member Communications: Another benefit of membership is the ability to directly contact other members. Individual members can either make their profile information visible or blocked from other members. In any case, members can contact other members through the web site without any emails being disclosed.

Technical Information: A huge benefit of the club is the availability of specific technical information about all aspects of the Mercedes-Benz product line. The forum continues to be a valuable resource, but the new site provides direct access to technical experts along with the ability to submit technical questions in a more structured manner in the Tech Talk section.

Visibility: Since all of the valuable Mercedes-Benz information from the club is now consolidated in a single web site, visitors are immediately introduced to the club when they happen upon the site while searching the web.

Club Operations: Unlike the past, National Business Office personnel are not consumed with membership updates on a local database. Individual members can update their member information and renew online. The NBO uses various features of the new site to distribute information to section leadership, provide election information to members and communicate with leadership across the US and Canada.

Marketing: In the past, new members came almost exclusively from face-to-face invitations from current members. The club did not want to lose any of that personal feel online. When a new member joins, the club stays in touch by email, giving additional ways to benefit from club membership. Existing members quickly learn of new events, programs, raffles and other opportunities.

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Colorado Department of Corrections

Rick Nashleanas — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 19:21:55 +0000

The Colorado Department of Corrections (DOC) needed two types of websites.

The DOC needed a new, attractive web site to communicate to the public - a site that could be quickly updated by non-technical DOC personnel.
The DOC needed an internal communications portal to allow employees across the state to share information.

During their preliminary research, DOC IT personnel discovered and focused on Drupal for their development platform. It provided the flexibility, performance, security and ongoing support required for both sites. With all of the available plug-in modules, the DOC could get much more functionality within a limited budget. As an open source project, the fact that Drupal is free didn't hurt.

Of course, security is paramount at the DOC. The two sites are separated by an inviolate firewall and cannot communicate. Internally, only designated personnel may update selected content. Much of the development work on the site had to be conducted on-site. Finally, the amount of detail that we can share here about the intranet site will be very limited.

Monarch Digital redesigned the new public DOC site from scratch. Although the site will always be content packed, the site needed many more graphic elements to retain visitors' interest and to make the site more usable.

Monarch was able to build in many functions and features never previously available on the Colorado DOC site:

Leadership at individual facilities can post alerts on individual facility pages. These alerts might involve full or partial closure of facilities to the public. These alerts appear at the top of the home page sidebar.
Families can subscribe to facility alerts via Twitter, so if a facility is closed over a weekend, the family does not make a useless trip.
Media and the public can subscribe to a Twitter news feed.
The executive team and many staff members can be contacted by the public without revealing their email addresses.
Many downloadable pdf forms were replaced with online forms that can easily be kept up to date by non-technical DOC personnel.
Although administrative regulations must be provided in pdf format to retain signatures, they are indexed and searchable on the site.
An expandable sidebar menu system helps to organize the extensive content within main menu areas.
The new site interfaces to the legacy inmate search system.
An extensive job posting system is included, allowing potential applicants easily find positions and self-qualify themselves.
A dynamic news posting capability allows the DOC to more easily communicate with anyone on the web.
Login uses LDAP through existing login credentials.

The DOC intranet site provides an attractive portal to a wide variety of internal systems from HR policies to inmate support applications. The DOC IT staff used the Monarch design to create consistent interfaces to legacy systems throughout the intranet. Instead of traditional web pages, most pages contain php code that accesses, selects and formats data from other legacy systems.

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Pueblo County

Rick Nashleanas — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 14:05:16 +0000

When Pueblo County Colorado was faced with a sudden dearth of Drupal talent and a site that needed immediate enhancements, Monarch Digital was able to jump in and provide immediate results.

Often, it is much more difficult to jump into the middle of someone else's website than it is to develop a new site from scratch.

Monarch's first step is to (a) listen to our customer to learn what the website needs to do and (b) do a comprehensive audit of the site to identify opportunities and problems.

We found that the customized Drupal theme was generally working, but there were many extra template files and extra logic creating an environment that unreliably placed content across the page. Monarch completely rewrote the theming layer and consolidated unneeded Drupal content types, making adding and changing content easier and more reliable.

Then, Monarch used the original website comps to implement flexible event calendars along with feeds from various community sites.

Website:

www.pueblo.org

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Harrison School District 2

Rick Nashleanas — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 19:24:35 +0000

Harrison had a number of requirements of their new web site:

A modern look and feel portraying the openness and professionalism of the district.
A low-maintenance approach for technical and non-technical staff to update content and maintain the overall district site along with all the individual school sites.
They wanted a system that would grow with the needs of the district.

Monarch Digital was able to design, develop, train and assist in implementing over 20 web sites for the entire district. Some of the features include:

A customized theme for the overall district site.
A common theme across all school sites, customized with each school's colors.
A common code base for all the sites, decreasing the long term maintenance required.
Integrated and shared calendars along with an announcement system that posts closures across all sites.
Animated headers that non-technical users can easily modify.

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Genetic Alliance

Rick Nashleanas — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 18:28:57 +0000

"Genetic Alliance is the world’s leading nonprofit health advocacy organization committed to transforming health through genetics and promoting an environment of openness centered on the health of individuals, families, and communities."

Pursuing their mission, Genetic Alliance worked with Monarch Digital to create genesinlife.org, a friendly, easy-to-use resource for genetic information and support. Clearly and simply, the site explains the importance of genetics to your health and then steps the visitor through collecting your family history to specific genetic conditions and what you can do about them.

Genetic Alliance already had a designer and graphic capabilities in house, so Monarch was able to create a Drupal theme based upon the provided Genetic Alliance theme.

With a subject as complex as genetics, the site contains a easy to understand glossary of terms. Not only are these terms listed on the glossary page, but these terms are automatically underlined and their definitions pop up on the informational pages in the site.

Genesinlife.org is not Genetic Alliance's first Drupal site. As part of the development process, Monarch also linked the new site into a common login system already in place at Genetic Alliance.

Finally, Monarch trained Genetic Alliance personnel on maintaining content of the site and assisted in bringing the site online.

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RMC Library

Rick Nashleanas — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 22:38:37 +0000

The RMC Library is the professional development library for RMC Health, providing free access to health and wellness resources. The leadership of RMC Library turned to Monarch to tune and add additional functionality and usability enhancements across their new Drupal site.

At kick off, Monarch:

Replace existing popups on resources available to a unique abstract popup, providing more information to the visitor without having to navigate off site.
Improve the display of topics, allowing all categories to be displayed vertically while still displaying all the detailed information correctly in the left topic pane.
Overcome malformed rss feeds to correctly make the correct resources available on the RMC Library website.
Simplify and standardize visitor input forms, encouraging suggestions and links.

Monarch's project management methodology and tools help the leadership of the RMC Library to prioritize and monitor projects progress and rollout.

Website:

library.rmc.org

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Access Products

Rick Nashleanas — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 19:36:17 +0000

Access Products prides itself on its customer service. The company has government contracts to provide printing supplies to a number of government agencies. Access Products wanted to provide a custom purchasing portal for each agency, but they didn't want the overhead of developing and maintaining a completely separate site for each major customer.

Monarch Digital developed a unique multi-site Drupal implementation that minimizes site maintenance and cost while allowing the company to easily add new custom client sites. All customer sites are polling the same Drupal database, just like a standard multi-site Drupal implementation. Each customer organization has its own subdomain, epa.accessproductsinc.com, va.accessproductsinc.com, etc. Each customer's site is custom-themed, providing the unique look for that customer.

To implement a secure online ordering process, Monarch needed to implement an SSL certificate across all sites. However, traditional SSL certificates will only correctly work for a specific domain name. For example, an SSL certificate for www.accessproductsinc.com will not correctly work for the subdomain epa.accessproductsinc.com. Monarch acquired and implemented a wildcard SSL so all current and future subdomains could use the same SSL certificate. Out of the box, the Drupal SecurePages module does not support wildcard SSL certificates, so Monarch had to modify this module.

For a number of business reasons, Access Products needed to keep its master product catalog in a database located at their site. Monarch developed an easy product upload and import process that uploads and updates the online product catalog. As all of the client organizations are using the same database, all customers receive the updates immediately and Access Products personnel only need to upload the updated product catalog once.

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IStartedaChurch.com

Rick Nashleanas — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:02:16 +0000

As a website development tool, Drupal can be relatively easy to use to get a basic site up and operational. However, another power of Drupal is that it can include extremely advanced web features. Implementing these advanced features can be technically challenging at best.

Global Action's marketing coordinator originally developed IStartedaChurch.com in Drupal, building out most of the infrastructure and designing and developing an original theme for the site. Then, Monarch came in to:

Move and optimize the shared hosting environment.
Installing best of breed modules not currently on the site.
Setting up recurring payments and configuring authorize.net.
Apply advanced theming functions.
Implement a wide variety of functionality.

When Monarch was originally brought in, we were really focused on basic site functionality. As Monarch personnel quickly addressed these tasks, Global Action moved Monarch on to more "like to have" features.

Website:

www.istartedachurch.com

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Bad Gizmo Repair

Rick Nashleanas — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 13:10:40 +0000

Your iPod® breaks and you're out of luck, right? Not at all. Enter Bad Gizmo Repair - a company that can repair your portable device at a fraction of the cost of replacing it.

The folks at Bad Gizmo Repair approach a repair the way you'd like the process to be: simple, easy and safe. If you have a problem with your device, you just go to their free testing page and Bad Gizmo Repair will send you a box with free shipping. The Bad Gizmo Repair technicians diagnose the problem with your device and give you a free estimate for repairs.

By the way, if you're a do-it-yourselfer, you can find the repair guides and buy the parts and tools you need.

Monarch implemented a unique ordering process for the free testing process, allowing the visitor to easily order the free testing and giving Bad Gizmo Repair personnel an easy interface to track the order and keep in touch with the customer on the status of the device.

Bad Gizmo Repair will be adding repair guides, answers and the opportunity to sell your device to them.

Sales have jumped tremendously since Bad Gizmo Repair brought its new site online. The future is bright as devices like the iPad^® go off warranty, and the services Bad Gizmo Repair provides become even more important.

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Quanta USA

Rick Nashleanas — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 15:33:39 +0000

As the exclusive US distributor for Quanta, Quanta USA sells the entire line of Quanta's aesthetic laser line in the US. The web site had to portray the quality, craftsmanship and technology embodied in these aesthetic lasers.

The design of this site is an excellent example of how Monarch can partner with our clients' design and technical personnel to produce a site that give both the look and feel and functionality needed.

Client personnel worked internally to develop most design elements of the site, using Monarch as a sounding board based upon our experience. Then, Monarch converted the design into a Drupal theme with all the functionality needed. Finally, client personnel took the lead to populate the site's content and tune it over time.

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