The Daily CAFE

Helping teachers and students thrive by eliminating barriers and providing structure.

Complexity, Executed With Elegance

The Daily Cafe is the online home of a handful of educational frameworks provided by Washington-based educational development company The 2 Sisters. They provide and facilitate their research-based, well-established programs through their print materials, in-person (and online) trainings, and significant web presence. We were brought in to do a total overhaul / rebuild of their site in order to help bring these resources to new generations of teachers and to streamline and enhance the user experience for the large existing user base.

Platform
Drupal
Services
API Integration
Design
E-commerce
Ongoing Support
Site Building
Strategy
User Experience
Project URL
The Daily CAFE

Section Title
A Clean Start

Section Intro

From an early point, it became clear that we would not just be porting over the structural hierarchies from the old site and giving it a new look.

Content

This rebuild was an opportunity for the organization to restructure their presence on the web and re-think about the way their online resources are categorized and how they relate to one another.

We worked closely together to find the perfect combination of what worked for their framework and what made sense from an information architecture perspective.

This meant many hours on the phone and in front of a whiteboard, working out all of the fine details in advance of the build.

However, it was a crucial step in order to make sure that the new site didn't immediately inherit the organizational issues that were a major motivating factor for the new site. 

Section Title
Structured (but Flexible)

Content

For the thousands of resources that the site offers, we use a template that presents the information in a consistent, easy-to-digest format. But for the hundreds of more curated listing and landing pages on the site, content managers needed more flexibility in their options for layout without having to bring developers in every time they needed to vary from the norm. To accommodate this, we built tools that allow webmasters to create and manage "page sections" of a wide-variety of pre-determined types that they can use as they see fit. The layouts are flexible and diverse enough to allow for endless variation, without sacrificing consistency in design or code manageability.  

Section Title
Membership Matters

Section Intro

The site utilizes a custom-built paywall (with administrative controls for webmasters) that provides certain resources for free but ultimately drives users toward paid membership. For this, we use Drupal Commerce to handle a complex set of custom subscription "products", but leave the complexity behind the scenes so that the user experience is simple and intuitive. On top of this base, we created many custom features to accommodate the needs of the site. 

 

Some highlights:

Content

  • Free trials (either granted explicitly by administrators or redeemed via a custom "trial code")
  • The ability to pay via Purchase Order or Check (and administrator management of these payments)
  • Custom tools for administrators to manually grant/extend/modify memberships 

  • The ability to sign up and pay for a handful of members, allowing a single payer to create / renew / manage memberships for their "group"
  • Robust sales reports
  • Automated, scenario-specific emails triggered by various actions as a part of the e-commerce platform

Section Title
Automation Is Key

Content

One of the major goals of the rebuild was to cut down on recurring manual actions that were unnecessarily tying up webmaster resources and leading to duplicate efforts across systems. 

Now, email blasts are generated weekly through Mailchimp's RSS-to-email campaign functionality, upcoming event info is dynamically pulled from ticket provider APIs, and whenever possible, admins have the ability to perform repetitive administrative actions en masse thanks to custom management tools built using Drupal's Views Bulk Operations.

Section Title
Seamless Migration

Section Intro

When there is already an established web presence, it's important that nothing of value is lost in the leap to a new framework.

Content

Forgetting this can mean that the new site actually provides a worse experience for the most crucial users. We knew from the start that one of our major initiatives was going to be keeping everything lined up for a seamless transition, so we built tools to help remodel and migrate the old data and wrote re-usable import scripts which allowed us to test the process and make corrections. The end result was a successful migration of thousands of pieces of content, with their relationships and categories intact, and over 100k users who were able to pick right up the next day, still having access to their bookmarked resources, discussion board posts, and paid memberships.

Section Title
Into The Future

Content

We tend to inherit a lot of projects when other developers become unresponsive or not up to the task, so it's always a pleasure to get to provide support for a project that we built and are intimately familiar with. After the initial couple of weeks of addressing real-world user issues post-launch, we shift right into ongoing-support mode, where we develop a plan to address minor adjustments and new features on a schedule that works for all parties.