Project Profile: Mass Mentoring Partnership

How a Mentoring Organization Supercharged Its Website

Quick Read

Mass Mentoring Partnership is the only statewide organization dedicated to strategically expanding quality mentoring to meet the needs of youth across Massachusetts. But the high-profile organization that so many mentoring programs depend on for support was finding it difficult to manage its labor-intensive website.

Mass Mentoring came to Boston-area Web development and design firm Talance, Inc., for a content management system that the marketing staff could keep on top of amongst their myriad other duties.

The site received a complete system shift and upgrade, including a powerful Drupal content management system, advanced search, simplified menu structure, interactive calendar, news updates section and Flash image upgrades for easy editing. It also has integrated search engine optimization. The new system is easy to manage and helps effectively deliver the partnership's message across the Internet.

The Challenge

Mass Mentoring Partnership, a non-profit that serves more than 165 mentoring programs, has a wide reach and a high profile. Its programs are sanctioned by organizations such as the Boston Red Sox and the city's mayor, yet its website presented challenges. It was hard to manage and had an inflexible design that made frequent updates difficult.

The biggest challenge was that each page was a separate HTML file, and staff was forced to learn coding to make rudimentary changes. This also made it difficult for administrators and website visitors to find pages. Each page was stored in a maze of subdirectories, and administrators sometimes found it so difficult to locate existing pages that they would simply create a duplicate. A content management system (CMS) was a natural solution by making it easy to make changes and manage pages while providing a robust site search.

The Project

Talance met with the Mass Mentoring team to talk about the existing website structure, discover design limitations and map out an ideal website structure. After creating a plan that was logical and eliminated the overlap, Talance custom-built a Drupal content management system that fit around the existing design that the Mass Mentoring team liked.

The newly launched website includes:

• Flexible design: Customizable feature boxes on the homepage let staff make changes on the fly without altering the design. Rotating images on the homepage created with a Flash movie are now editable by administrators.
• Robust site search: Not only are all pages logically laid out and easy to find with the menu system, the site search lets visitors use keywords to locate pages.
• Cross- browser performance: Not everything on the former site displayed in all browsers correctly. The new site displays correctly whether you're working with IE, Firefox or Safari.
• Calendar: The new and improved training calendar makes it easy to browse the numerous events and programs.
• What's New: A list on the homepage allows the agency to highlight its newest programs and initiatives.
• Editing control: Now writers and editors can work on the same pages simultaneously without fear of overwriting each other's work.
• Dynamic sitemap: Every page that's added to the system is automatically captured in the sitemap, making it easy for visitors to see the site at a glance and also helps web robots to catalog correct pages.

From the Client

Talance was able to simplify our Web site in ways I never dreamed imaginable! Our main concern in adopting a content management system was to ensure that the design of the old Web site was not lost. Talance was able to maintain the look of our site while enabling us to update the site more easily and efficiently. The staff had great suggestions, particularly for menu structure, and overall helped us launch a more user-friendly, interesting, robust site. They answered (and continue to answer) all of our questions quickly and patiently. We've been so pleased that we're using Talance, again, to design and launch a Web site for one of our mentor recruitment campaigns.

Lauren Dean
Manager of Communications and Public Awareness
Mass Mentoring Partnership