“It was an easy and seamless process. Went much faster, smoother and easier than I expected!”
Palo Alto Partners In Education Client on the process of working with Design TLC
Partners in Education (PiE) raises money from parents and the community to provide all Palo Alto Unified School District students an educational experience beyond what is possible with public funding.
Design TLC inherited website maintenance for Palo Alto Partners in Education (PAPIE) in early 2019. The website was built with WordPress and was functional, but needed some updates and eventually, a refresh would be needed.
We spent the last year helping to enhance the website with some custom post types, including functionality to easily add and display participating schools in Palo Alto. We also helped create custom functionality with Gravity Forms donation forms to include a formula to add fee recovery and supplemental donation. Users need to select a donation method before beginning the donation process. PAPIE relies on eChecks as a primary donation platform, as this method has almost no fees using Forte. We talked to GiveWP about integrating with Forte, as adding eCheck payments with low fees to the GiveWP plugin would be really helpful to improve the user experience. Until that integration exists, we are continuing to use Gravity Forms, which works fine.
New Design
The old PAPIE website looked out of date. The images on the sub-pages were cut off and had a screen overlay that was part of the theme. We installed Beaver Builder Page Builder and created a more updated, user-friendly design with a compelling headline and singular call to action.
Content Structure
We helped organize the content for PAPIE to improve the user experience, both for website visitors and for the PAPIE staff for adding content. The individual school content is housed in a custom post type, which allows PAPIE staff to add and edit content and keep it consistent for all schools.
The different news sections are also organized by categories to display specific content types from the main News page.
We created a user-friendly subpage navigation in a horizontal blue bar, which makes it easier to navigate between pages within each section, even on mobile.
Client Portal
We use a Client Portal for new website projects. This is where clients can access all elements of their website project throughout the process. The initial proposal, invoice receipts, schedules, content documents, wireframe and design prototypes and more are all in one place. This makes project management go smoothly.
We loved working with PAPIE staff, who were really engaged in the process, proactive and responsive! We look forward to continuing to support them with ongoing website maintenance and updates.