The Seed Company
Website Redesign, Content Management and Workflow
The Seed Company
The Seed Company is a Christian organization and an affiliate of Wycliffe Bible Translators, providing opportunities for individuals to partner with Bible translation projects around the world. Such partnerships involve significant financial commitments that span five to ten years. Maintaining these critical relationships requires thorough, efficient communication.
We joined forces with TSC to help re-evaluate its online communications strategy in early 2006, at the same time it was concluding an extensive brand re-discovery process. We welcomed the opportunity to participate in one of the organization's on-site brand discovery workshops at its headquarters in Dallas, which served as a perfect lead-in for the web discovery process that soon followed. Established design and functionality goals included:
- A look and feel that reinforces TSC's brand
- More efficient access to critical content
- Frequent, timely updates for TSC partners
- Online giving opportunities
- Robust, web-based content management tools
- Workflow controls for online and offline content
- Integration with pre-existing enterprise CRM and project management systems
Interface Design
Art director Ken Woodworth created a clean, engaging interface that pulls relevant content to the home page and landing pages. The creative concept was produced as XHTML/CSS templates.
Drupal Implementation and Customization
The backend was built using Drupal and includes a mix of core, contributed and custom modules. Integration with internal systems was achieved by exposing legacy data via simple web services and providing web-based tools within Drupal for managing this data. Examples of this integration include:
- Capturing changes to any project-related communications from TSC's internal systems and providing opportunities for web administrators to publish these changes, or other related content, to the web
- Providing real-time project health statistics for published project profiles
- Displaying account histories for web user accounts that include both online and offline giving
- Logging and exposing changes to user data for use by TSC's internal systems
We used the contributed workflow module – with extensive customizations – to replace TSC's previously deployed workflow solution. Customizations were created in a separate, standalone module that alters the default user interface and adds functionality required by TSC, including the ability to assign workflow steps to specific user accounts rather than access roles.
We created a custom theme to accommodate the creative direction established during the design phase, outputting valid XHTML/CSS code. The theme was extended to both the public website and admin sections.
The resulting website delivers strongly on each of the established goals for design and functionality. Visually, it is an extension of the TSC brand. Content is intuitively accessible. A robust backend provides tools for frequent updates and integrates critical data for a more rich, compelling user experience.
