Challenge
The College of the Liberal Arts, at Penn State University, approached Six Feet Up about developing a brand new responsive website for the McCourtney Institute for Democracy.
The Institute for Democracy had previously used a very simple landing page to provide visitors with basic information and direct people to their partner's websites. The organization was most looking forward to a new, clean, professional and content management-driven website.
Implementation Details
The open source CMS Plone was chosen for this project because it is the College of the Liberal Arts established platform. Six Feet Up created a new Plone 4.3 instance, implemented a new theme using Diazo, and added responsive design, making the site compatible in all browsers, mobile devices and iPads.
The site utilizes the Plone product collective.panels, which uses only one theme, yet allowed the team to build the homepage with portlets, creating a unique look and feel.
"We were able to deliver a sharp and responsive site that is ready for Plone 5 in only 3 weeks."
The site went from having just a landing page to be a full site with About, Projects, News, Events, Awards, People, and Archive pages.
Throughout the project, the Six Feet Up development team worked closely with the Penn State development team and held bi-weekly calls to discuss best practices and processes.
Results
After 3 weeks of work, the new Institute fr Democracy website was deployed to production on the Penn State University servers. New, fresh content was added to the site and was recently made live to the public.
The client enjoyed their experience working with the Six Feet Up development team, as the team provided timely communication and completed the deliverables within the time promised. "We were able to deliver a sharp and responsive site that is ready for Plone 5 in only 3 weeks," stated Gabrielle Hendryx-Parker, CEO of Six Feet Up.
The new website is live at http://www.democracyinstitute.la.psu.edu/
