Site Name: Mayor’s Time Program Locator
Site URL: http://www.mayorstime.com/programlocator
In 2004 I was contracted by IDEACore to participate in the revamp the website for Mayor’s Time, a social services organization in Detroit. While IDEACore had grephic designers working on the look and feel for the primary site, they needed someone with strong Web/DB skills to revamp the Program Locator component of the site.
The Program Locator is designed to help connect parents in Detroit with after-school programs for thier kids to participate in. They had an existing system, which was coded in JavaScript Pages and mySQL.
It had many deficiencies, including a clunky interface for the parents, poor tools for managing the database. This resulted in a poorly managed dataset, which left the databse containing lots of outdated information that often times gave the parents less-than-useful results.
The folks at Mayor’s Time were mandating a PHP scripted system…good news for me, being that’s my area of expertise.
I first redesigned the database to allow for more flexible data management, normalize the database and enforce referential integrity.
The parental tools were revamped dramatically to allow for a more pleasant and easy-to-use searching system. The parents could now conduct a search with one click of the mouse, and continuously refine the search by changing the parameters.
The presentation of the results was also enhanced dramatically, and we were able to provide parents with much more informative pages with a few new excitement features.
The coolest stuff I coded was really the back-office tools. The new tools enforced referential integrity and all the basic database stuff, doing away with the hundreds of widowed and orphan records from the old system. I also added timestamps to all records, allowing the data manager to review program data that my be old or out of date.
The new system encourges program providers to participate in the management of their own data, greatly reducing the amount of incorrect or stale data that might be held in the system. It also reduces the time burden on the Mayor’s Time staff.
Of course, the data manager at Mayor’s Time has complete control over what goes onto the site, but is allowed to act as more of an editor while the program providers create the actual content.