What NBACC needed was a way to connect their schools under the organization so that the organization was a more credible resource in the field. Icreated a website for them that would allow for potential students to browse programs by keyword and get a list of schools in the province that offered training in their desired field. The website would provide students with brief descriptions of the program as well a contact information and a link back to the respective schools and their programs.

Of course this presented a problem…

With limited staff and hundreds of programs offered, it would be impossible for NBACC to keep the information current if they had to manage it themselves. The solution: have the schools manage it for them. We wrote a web application to tie in to the website that allowed each school to have an administrator who could log in and edit their school information, add and delete programs, enter contact information, even upload a school logo and photos.

Since the NBACC website is essentially promoting their programs for them, the schools quickly caught on and began using the system.

Overall, I was pretty pleased. This is really the first completely custom application that I have designed and built on my own. When all is said and done, the measure of good programming is whether or not people use it. I think this one measures up. It solved a huge need and let regular staff with no web experience update their school’s web presence.

Take a look at the screenshot below, or visit the NBACC site here.

Charles showed me some samples of the types of graphic ads that they would place campus newspapers and magazines.  I thought they looked great, but they didn’t really complete the picture. The print ads typically had a thought provoking statement or question on them, but the call to action seemed to be directed to the organization’s website.  Because of that, the website had to become the new focus of the ministry, as it would ultimately have the impact on the student’s lives.

After a couple of meetings we came out with 2 priorities.  Charles’ number one priority: design. The look had to be killer and I knew that I wanted to work with my good friend George Ortiz on the mockups.  After a couple of attempts, George nailed it for Charles and my job really started. My number one priority: the user experience. I wanted the site to adapt to the user based on their information. Charles had already expressed that he wanted to incorporate the specific schools in a cool way. I finally had a breakthrough when I was creating the registration process…What if the site was able to customize it’s graphics on-the-fly based on what school the student was from? It was a simple solution, but it worked beautifully.  You can check out the screenshots below to get a feel for how it works.

The second part of the experience was creating a site that united students from different universities into a Christian community. With online discussions and video testimonies, I am looking forward the day when I can log on and see students from the University of Michigan discussing the environment from a Biblical perspective with students from Oregon State. For now, however, we’re starting small and focusing on the 4 main Utah universities.

See the site live at www.goduncomplicated.net.