The UK Markey Cancer Foundation is the fundraising arm for the University of Kentucky's cancer treatment center. UK Markey had an existing WordPress site that relied on an out of date framework burdened by a reliance on complex plugins — along with yearly subscription fees and a frustrating "a la carte" approach that charged for key functionality.
UK Markey needed an easier way to manage content for events, news items, and promotional content throughout the site. They also needed a less burdensome way of keeping track of and paying for plugin updates.
After consultation with the client regarding their typical business process, AG Strategic completely rebuilt the website to use the more extensible Understrap framework and bettered the functionality of the commercial plugins with custom plugins that do not require subscriptions.
The new website benefits from a fresh redesign, quicker page loads, easier backend maintenance, and lower overall recurring costs.
Register at https://ruti.bike
Ruti is our new, text-message-based planning tool that finds bike routes with the least amount of car traffic, or traffic stress. “Right Route. Less Stress.”
Ruti is the product of our passion for biking. It combines a wonderful partnership with the great people at the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC); Corey's prior work on CyclePhilly; and his longtime friendship with Tim Hoenig - a fellow biker and polymath, who brought his product and brand management expertise to the table.
Background
In 2016, Corey and Tim started researching what motivated people to bike, and, more importantly, bike often. They came across many startling statistics but mainly that 60% of potential bike riders classify themselves "as interested but concerned." In response, they launched WhyABike, a simple website asking people to tell their biking story - why they rode or, alternatively, stopped riding a bike.
A lot of the WhyABike stories and research suggested that the lack of access to a reliable bicycle was one of the reasons people did not ride often. The research also suggested that many people had poor perceptions of how safe it is to bike. This discouraged regular riding. With that, we imagined a service that could 1) find the right bike for a person; and 2) keep them riding by mimicking the friendly bike route advice of an experienced bike riding friend.
Our research continued over the years but fully in "side project" mode while we worked on other various projects. Corey secretly toiled away, working on a prototype of a "friendly biking directions bot." Underscoring the notion that something good can always come from the bad, it was not until the pandemic hit that the side project fully turned into a real project for us. We partnered with the DVRPC and it was their expertise, data and a great team of people that turned Ruti into a reality. We are so fortunate and grateful for their partnership and shared values.
About Ruti
Ruti is a conversational app that combines text messaging through Twilio plus the Google Maps API and DVRPC’s Bike Level of Traffic Stress (LTS) data to find the most comfortable bike route between two locations. The resulting bike route map highlights the “stress levels” along a bike route so riders can see where car volume and speed is usually the highest and prepare accordingly.
The underlying dataset, DVRPC’s Bike LTS analysis, has rated over 29,500 miles of roadway in their nine-county Greater Philadelphia region. The analysis accounts for each road segment’s number of traffic lanes, effective speed, and if present, the different types of bike infrastructure, such as sharrows, bike lanes, or protected bike lanes. These factors are used to determine an LTS classification ranging from 1 to 4, where 1 is relaxing and suitable for most riders, and 4 is uncomfortable for most riders - including those who are most experienced.
We hope Ruti will encourage both casual and experieced bike riders to ride more often. The casual rider can use Ruti to avoid roads with lots of car traffic, to get to a farmers market, the grocery store, or a park. While someone who rides more regularly might use Ruti to find a new route between home and work. The person who rides everywhere might find a more comfortable route that they may have never considered before to a destination, such as a park or a trailhead.
We are most proud of how easy it is to access and use Ruti. It is accessible to anyone with any phone. You just send Ruti a text message through your own text messaging app ang go, there is no need to download any additional app.
We hope you'll give Ruti a try and, if you like it, please tell a friend.
To learn more about Ruti and try it out, please visit rutiapp.bike
5th Square is an urbanist political action committee that supports candidates committed to policies that provide greater access to transportation, land use, and public space for all Philadelphia residents. 5th Square was interested in increasing engagement with members and supporters through their contact lists. While traditional email communications proved effective, 5th Square was also looking for more direct and interactive ways to communicate with its supporters. Further, 5th Square needed a solution that would not be an administrative burden to its communications team, many of which worked remotely.
AG worked with 5th Square’s executive team to design a text messaging application that allowed them to send bulk and direct sms messages to supporters through the organization’s existing communications platform, Slack.
Given that 5th Square is a largely distributed team with many members of its executive team working remotely, AG wanted to design a solution that would leverage the existing tools its team was comfortable using -- particularly, Slack, to coordinate communications and Nationbuilder, to manage supporter contact lists. With this in mind, AG designed and built an application that allowed 5th Square executive members to send text messages directly from a dedicated, private and secure Slack channel to a supporter’s registered phone using a Slack slash command. AG built the application in the Laravel PHP framework and used Slack and Nationbuilder APIs to integrate it with those platforms.
The AG application acts as intermediary between Slack and the eventual recipient of the 5th Square text message. Authorized 5th Square members draft a message in Slack in a private channel and send it to the application using a specially formatted slash command which contains the content and a supporter list code. The Laravel application then retrieves a list of phone numbers from 5th Square’s Nationbuilder database, using the Nationbuilder API, formats the message sent from Slack, and sends out the messages to supporters using Twilio’s SMS API.
Message recipients can reply to the message and the application will route the message back to 5th Square’s private Slack channel. Notably, the application does all this without storing recipient phone numbers. Instead, it leverages the security of Slack and Nationbuilder, retrieving only what it needs via their APIs.
5th Square happily reported higher engagement with its supporters using text messages over other, more traditional, forms of communication like email. Executive team members also found it to be a more personalized and intimate way to communicate with supporters, all of whom were more likely to respond to a particular call to action.
The Nutrition Science Initiative(NuSI), a nonprofit medical research organization focused on obesity, diabetes, and related metabolic diseases, has been in operation since 2012. NuSI felt that their previous site did not reflect the current progress of their research initiatives and that the site was too focused on the organization instead of the research.
Create an entirely new web presence to enhance NuSI’s credibility by reflecting the current progress of their research initiatives; and transition NuSI to a secure SSL encrypted web host and more flexible web hosting platform.
AG Strategic met with NuSI to devise a new information architecture and content scheme that foregrounded NuSI’s research results and took the focus off of the previous site’s marketing focus.
AG designed an information rich homepage that eschewed a marketing slideshow and instead used an illustration banner married to research “cards” to highlight the most important content. Also, AG used a custom theme based on Bootstrap 4 and the Advanced Custom Fields plugin to allow easy extension of the design if needed later. In addition, AG customized the default admin panel using Advanced Custom Fields to ensure that content can be quickly and clearly updated.
At the same time, AG moved the site from shared hosting to the Pantheon.io platform, which offered built in SSL certificates for a similar annual cost as the shared hosting, while offering speed and development tools welcomed by the NuSI webmaster.
The revised site is faster, more flexible, and more focused on current organizational priorities.
MicroSociety is a Philadelphia nonprofit with a long track record of enabling immersive experiential education in K-12 schools around the world. Their website grew over the years on typical shared hosting to include more than 20 plugins of varying quality, complexity, and security -- all integrated loosely into a commercial theme. This complexity resulted in difficulty in performing content updates, inconsistent branding, and compromised performance and security.
MicroSociety needed access to its content and wanted to move to an easy-to-use content management system with a responsive front-end and reliable hosting that allowed for quick and easy content updates.
AG Strategic offered to move MicroSociety to a standards-compliant framework, using Bootstrap 4 and the trusted Underscores WordPress template framework. Also, AG Strategic advocated for the state-of-the-art Pantheon.io managed hosting platform.
On an interim basis, AG gained access to the production server and performed interim updates for security and stability while building out the new site on Pantheon. After a reskin and redesign, including crucial style and design changes needed by the client, AG thoroughly tested the new site in its new managed hosting platform.
The new MicroSociety site incorporates an easily updatable theme framework on best-in-class managed hosting that loads many fewer plugins, resulting in greatly improved performance, brand consistency, and security.
With 8 Nobel Prize winners in its rich history, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) stands tall in the field of biological research and education, as the 125+ year old proving ground for innovative research and education programs that have fostered game-changing discoveries and advanced healthcare, modern agriculture, and environmental sustainability.
In February 2017, CSHL asked AG Strategic Design to completely reimagine and rebuild CSHL's public facing website, elevating its web technology and presence to match the world-class status of this organization. After working with CSHL's internal communications and technology teams for eight months, AG helped launch the new responsive site on the WordPress managed hosting platform Pantheon.io.
CSHL tasked AG to help it achieve a compelling redesign of its core public facing website while meeting these minimum requirements
CSHL is a dynamic institution on the leading-edge of cancer, neuroscience, plant biology and quantitative biology research. Home to a scientific community of 600, with a total of 1,000 faculty, students and employees, CSHL required a web presence that allowed them to focus on conveying their great breadth of work while eliminating any friction in delivering such related content to the web. Thus, AG focused on making the delivery and management of information about the institution's advances as easy as possible.
From a technological standpoint, this made WordPress the ideal choice for a content management system. WordPress's strengths include a well-developed PHP-based core and user-friendly out-of-the-box admin panel. WordPress also remains flexible enough to serve as an enterprise level content management system that can be customized to any institution's needs. As such, this allowed for a highly collaborative and iterative custom design of both front-end and back-end features for the site.
Further, we wanted CSHL's internal teams to be able to focus on creating and managing content instead of being bogged down managing the servers and codebase that hosted the site. To this end, we leveraged Pantheon.io's managed WordPress hosting platform.
Under CSHL's previous content management system, whenever content creators wanted to refresh the design or, in some cases, even update copy, they had to make a change request to a back-end web development team. Frequently, the development team had to push the whole site again any time a change was made. This meant that both developers and content creators were unable to focus on tasks that benefitted the institution as a whole. Specifically, for content creators, this meant creating new compelling content that showcased the institutions achievements and, for the development team, this meant updating product features and making performance enhancements. Pantheon's managed hosting development, staging and production environments allowed us to separate code from content so that each unit could focus on its core competencies.
Over the course of eight months AG reconstitued over 1,000 pages of content, wrote 10,000+ lines of custom code and created 50+ custom layouts. These are just some of the features:
Compelling First Impressions
With a fully responsive design, the site looks great on any device.
Cross Promotion
Cross-promotion of various types of content where virtually any piece of content could be featured in other areas of the site at the click of a button with a customized WordPress administrative panel.
Related Content
Related Content feeds that help visitors continue on their user journey by surfacing content topically relevant to pieces he or she might already have self-selected
Faculty Profiles
Faculty profiles integrated throughout all content-types and pages. This allows content producers to connect profiles to pages that promote each faculty member's research focus areas, publications or other interests
Newsstand
A completely re-imaged Newsstand section of the site integrating dynamic content such as videos or podcasts
What this equates to practically is a system that elegantly pulls together content and resources from all areas of the site and covers the breath of work of the institution in a very easy to administer way and, more importantly, compelling way.
PolyCore Therapeutics is a pharmaceutical start-up specializing in Parkinson's disease and other central nervous system diseases.
PolyCore approached AG Strategic with a request for a quick turn around for a public website to satisfy a very important need: the firm's co-founder was selected to present at a conference highlighting PolyCore's work in two weeks time.
AG Strategic rolled out a responsive, Bootstrap-based site using managed hosting platform Pantheon. AG Strategic built a modern and compelling WordPress site using an agile development process to meet the deadline within one week from receipt of site content to launch.
With 8 Nobel Prize winners in its rich history, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) stands tall in the field of biological research and education, as the 125+ year old proving ground for innovative research and education programs that have fostered game-changing discoveries and advanced healthcare, modern agriculture, and environmental sustainability.
A leader in scientific discovery and biology education, CSHL retained AG Strategic to elevate its web practices, technology, design and teams to match the world-class status of this organization.
CHSL engaged AG Strategic to conduct an assessment of our public website technologies and practices, with a specific interest in content management, custom web content, and how well it was positioned for future growth and flexibility and a strategic responsive redesign.
AG Strategic, on three separate visits, conducted extensive interviews with division directors, stakeholders, and senior leadership. In addition, we analyzed a disparate set of content management approaches -- ranging from PERL to .NET to PHP on both IIS and the LAMP stack. Additional outside informants at colleges, universities, and top tier peer research organizations helped establish a baseline for best practices. After thorough background research, AG Strategic prepared a sourced 34-page report, Executive Summary and extensive high-level presentation for CSHL President Bruce Stillman.
A previous website redesign for a leading children's hospital had partially implemented a responsive approach by using tables for layout, thus limiting use of CSS frameworks that use modern grid-based layout approaches. AG Strategic was retained to responsively redesign the site under a modern framework and manage the implementation.
Efficiently manage the web production of a responsive redesign framework for the site. Create a modular, modern CSS framework to allow a variety of page layouts. Retain the existing top-level navigation structure.
AG Strategic designed and provided the following design assets:
Over 20 modular CSS components based on the Bootstrap 3 framework,
Custom code to collapse local section content to a hamburger menu at mobile without conflicting with the existing megamenu,
A responsive, prominent “Donate” button to aid fundraising goals, and, finally,
An online code repository and style guide for in-house developers to use during CMS integration.
Fully functional bootstrap framework pages and custom styles that will be used to redesign the site for an upcoming campaign.
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