Category: Projects

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OPSEU 479: unions work better electronically

OPSEU 479

Unions — or any other volunteer-driven organization — face an uphill battle for the attention of their membership. This is especially true of those whose structures and methods predate the internet.

The ‘old ways’ might still work, but with each interaction you damage your reputation as your audience — who’ve never known a world without online shopping — get a load of how they’re supposed to interact with you.

OPSEU 479 took major steps to overcome that digital deficit when they launched their website. With one modestly-priced project, they carved out a digital presence for themselves on the internet, gave themselves the ability to reach out to their members, and obsoleted Microsoft Word tables as the canonical source of data about their members.

The site uses a minimal approach, eschewing heroic plans and grand gestures as its leaders realized that their busy lives didn’t afford them the opportunity to become content creators or influencers.

Instead they wanted to hit that sweet spot where the internet actually made their lives easier. And between the CRM, the mailing list and the basic contract, pension and membership info, they’ve done it.

Have a look
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Ellis House: visual refresh

Ellis House, an amazing Bed and Breakfast in Canada's must-see vacation destination, Niagara Falls

Niagara Falls is one of the more popular tourist destinations in Canada. The Canadian side receives about 12 million visitors per year. So how does Ellis House, a small bed and breakfast get noticed among the thousands of hotels, apartments, camper vans and other competitors?

Well, with a website refresh, for one. It’s funny that a lot of guests like ‘quaint’ and ‘historic’ as descriptors for a place to stay, but apply those words to a website and they’re synonymous with ‘disaster’ and ‘stay away’.

We romanticize days of yore but we don’t want to live there and we don’t want to use the tools they used. And that includes websites.

So a contemporary look, updated mobile-friendly theme, backed to an online reservation system and updated back end.

All on a reasonable budget.

Have a look

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Old Ottawa South Community Association: CMS migration, redesign

This is a long time client that hired me to redesign their site in the mid 2010s. The site had been using Joomla for a while and back then it was still an ongoing proposition. But by 2022, the design was dated and the CMS universe had galloped so far past Joomla it was time for a change.

This is a hair-raising prospect, especially when you add to the mix more than a decade of devoted chronicling of news and events in the community, stored diligently in the form of news items and more than 19GB of PDFs of the community association newspaper.

But it was the association’s first opportunity in a while to get their site up to date. So we needed to make the most of it.

And speaking of opportunities, since we were questioning everything, why not use the occasion to bring in a CRM to allow them to track and engage with the volunteers that are the heart of the association and who make all its efforts possible.

Phewf. That’s a lot.

The one ace in the hole I had was the staff at OSCA who were willing to jump in and audit the site’s content. I set up a few guidelines with them, including some that could be enforced technically, to winnow down the tens of hundreds of news items to a much smaller number.

They also took the time to review evergreen content, mostly related to the programs the association runs for children, youth and adults.

This client involvement was critical to the success of this project as (a) they’re the subject experts and (b) while bulk migration tools exist, they don’t get you all the way there and we needed to reduce the time spent massaging the retained legacy content into shape.

The site is constantly updated with news and event listings. And while it’s amazing that the association has this commitment to making its site into the heartbeat of the community, it does pose some content management challenges.

So one of the key innovations afforded by moving to WordPress and its universe of plugins was the availability of a plugin that automatically ‘sunsets’ posts that are older a year or two or whatever you chose.

There was also some extra work to do building a unified interface to the association’s two bulk email applications. One for programming notices, the other for community news.