The Social Planning and Research Council of British Columbia (SPARC BC) is a none-for-profit organization which has been operating since 1966. They work together with communities on issues such as Accessibility, Community Development Education, Income Security, and Community Social Planning. To many, SPARC BC is known as the organization that issues special permits to those who can park their vehicles at the designated parking areas for the disabled drivers.

SPARC BC's website is powered by Joomla! content Management System (CMS) and it follows the W3C Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) which means it is also accessible to the visually impaired users. Joomla! is one of the finest Open Source CMS solutions in the world as well as being a great Web Application Development framework.

A more human look and feel

The old SPARC BC website had a clinical blue and beige color scheme which sent out a message of a cold authority figure to the viewers. In reality SPARC BC is an organization which promotes the message of hope, inspiration, community, and peer support; therefore we decided to use an earthy and green color scheme with more organic visual elements that are more human friendly. The new theme was developed in collaboration with the SPARC BC's communication staff.

 This website's theme also makes use of well defined regions for the navigation items and large buttons that emphasize the organization's main focuses: Community Development Education, Community Social Planning, Accessibility, Research & Consulting, Income Security, and Parking Permits.

Combining Information Architecture & Training

During the project, numerous hours were spent with the SPARC BC's communication office staff to help them organize all the website content, weed out the old the content which were no longer necessary to be on the website, and plan new sections and categories for their new articles.

After this stage, the staff where step by step mentored on using the CMS, during which they've learned how to enter, organize, and maintain their content on their own.

During the content entry sessions they were also receiving useful tips on how to adopt a new technology within their organization and facilitate a smooth transition from the old technology to the new platform.

Organizing the Downloadable Documents

SPARC BC has a collection of over 160 documents on their website's Resources & Publication's section . Previously they had been using the DocMan extension which is a document management solution for the Mambo and Joomla CMS.

DocMan is a wonderful option, however the problem SPARC BC was facing was the fact that DocMan had far too many features which were hardly ever used, but they did clutter up the system. All we needed for this project was an easy way to upload Documents, organize them, and link them to the articles.

As a result, we developed the RubberDoc extension which does only that! RubberDoc is developed for the native Joomla! 1.5 and it is currently available for free under the GPL license for everybody to use.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

In order to make the website accessible, we had to develop a theme which rendered CSS only pages. HTML Tables are occasionally used only to display tabular data.

This approach also makes all the pages very readable to the Search Engine bots. The CMS also creates Search Engine Friendly (SEF) urls that contain keywords. We have also installed an extension which dynamically creates a google Sitemap.

In combination with the technical solution, we have also instructed and mentored the SPARC BC's staff on how to write and maintain search engine friendly content on their website, in order to enhance their google ranking.

Credits

SPARC BC was a collaborative project done by the following people:

• Rastin Mehr from rmd Studio - Information Architecture, CMS Custom Development, Consulting, and Training.
• Ash Sanieyan from PeerGlobe Technology - Web Application Development and great help in optimizing the Javascript code in the SPARC template, contributing to the development of RubberDoc Document Management Extension, and much more.
• Jeannette Duguay from JenTekk Web Solutions , for testing and documentation of RubberDoc extension and the SPARC BC's template.
• Lindsay Hindle, Communication Coordinator of the SPARC BC. who spent time with us from the beginning to the final stages of this project contributing to the ideas, content entry, and overall development of the project.
• Joanne Cheung, Graphic Designer at SPARC BC. Thank you for contributing great ideas and helping us on content maintenance and testing during the first week of website's launch