Victory for Women is the National Hemophilia Foundation’s women's program. This program provides educational resources and support for women in the bleeding disorder community. Educational resources are currently provided through in-person workshops, through online content, print content, videos and webinars. The Victory for Women website is also a key support piece where affected women can find a connection with others in their community and share their experiences and struggles.
NHF realized that the existing Victory for Women site was outdated and in need of a complete redesign. They also wanted a larger social component on the site that would effectively grow and support the community. This expanded forum needed to allow for users to share, connect and comment on stories, blogs, poetry, artwork, podcasts etc. The new Victory for Women site needed to be easier to use (navigate), mobile friendly, and also more appealing to the female demographic overall.
About the project
Design
It was important for the redesign of the Victory for Women site, first and foremost, to be appealing to women. Colour was a huge consideration factor as was the general layout of the site. Due to familiarity and comfort, a Pinterest inspired style layout was agreed upon which also flowed nicely with the mobile aspect of the design. Through consistent feedback and design iterations, colours were finalized when the proper look and feel was achieved.
Development
While utilizing the Drupal 7 platform and modules, the Cheeky development team realized that they would need to customize the integration of the masonry cards layout to achieve the best results. After the successful integration was built, the dev team tackled the following functionalities:
- Fair use of icons and graphics- to help navigate through the site along with text, menus and links
- Responsive design - interested in exploring vertical layout
- The ability to create basic pages, articles and links/redirects to external resources
- Ability for users to post artwork
- Ability for users to post blog entries and stories - National Hemophilia Foundation should be able to moderate this
- Ability for National Hemophilia Foundation to host podcasts and videos
- Online form to submit stories with approval process(es) to reduce spam
- Ability for users to “Ask the Experts” - to be answered and posted by staff who will consult experts where necessary (RN, SW etc.)
- Hybridauth Social Login (open source library that can integrate facebook, google and other social media login)
- Content rating system to like other users posts
- Content moderation system
Why Drupal was chosen
NHF required a content management system that would not only provide an easy to use administrative backend, but also be able to handle a high level of traffic while maintaining excellent security. After a lengthy discussion with NHF, it was agreed that the Drupal CMS was the answer (specifically Drupal 7). During this discovery phase, tasks were broken down into simple stories as to better understand the functionalities required. This step was invaluable for helping the Monkeys allay NHF’s budgetary concerns by allowing for an accurate estimate of time and effort needed for the project as a whole.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
- Foundation was chosen for the front-end theme for its responsive framework and to help make it easy to implement the beautiful design.
- Hybridauth Social Login was used to offer social login options for users and allowed easy integration for facebook, google and other social media login).
- The Media module was chosen to help making uploading images easier and to maintain a media library and reuse existing images.
- For SEO, the Google Analytics, XML Sitemap and Metatag modules were used.
