Case Study: Website Content Management
As a non-profit oranization we need to manage information that we publish to our members in our web site. The team neeeds to be able create and edit any piece of content.
Diaspora Council of Tanzanians in America (DICOTA)
Project Requirements
- Provide tools for the DICOTA team members to manage news content, publish events, or update static pages.
- Integrate an online platform to manage event user registration and payment via the DICOTA website.
- After initial setup, train DICOTA team members to manage online content management software.
Project Overview
To engage the growing Tanzanian diaspora, we need web tools that will enable DICOTA team members to reach this population more effectively using self-service content management systems and open-source web services.
The Challenge
Increase online subscription for conference events, and DICOTA membership by 30%.
The Approach & Solution
We initially developed the content management platform using Laravel web framework, PHP programming language, and MySQL database, we released functionality that enabled DICOTA team members to manage events, news articles, photo galleries, static pages like About Us and Contact, or all online from the self-service admin section. One year later we changed from an in-house content management platform to an open source one called WordPress. One of the reasons for the change was due to the cost of maintenance, as DICOTA had to hire a software engineer to maintain the platform, however, with an open-source platform this expense was avoided. WordPress provided the content management functionality we needed but also gave us the ability to quickly integrate with open-source plugins like email newsletters, member signup, event registration, and more.
