International Facility Management Association (Silicon Valley Chapter)
With just under 1000 members, IFMA Silicon Valley is the largest of approximately 60 chapters of the International Facilities Management Association. Chapter operations, including management of the chapter web site, are coordinated by committees. This means that web site maintenance and expansion is often directed by different people year to year.

hostADP.net was contracted in May, 2001 to redesign the IFMA-SV web site. In addition to updating the look and feel and providing a more effective information architecture, we also developed several technical features which automated key aspects of site maintenance, thereby meeting their need for frequently-changing site ownership and multiple content contributors.

The project involved the following elements:

• Content / Site Evaluation
• Development of a new Information Architecture / navigation
• Creation of a new look and feel
• Database-enabled content in several key areas of the site
• Usability studies to evaluate effectiveness of the new design

Technical Highlights

In addition to the above, hostADP built technical features into the site that enhanced navigation, eased server load, and allowed for maximum accessibility. We can deliver similar benefits to your site.

• Dynamic Style Sheets
  • Each element of the style sheet can be customized for different browsers.
  • For details see http://www.ifmasv.org/css.php?show=true
• Dynamic Breadcrumbs
  • Every page can determine where it resides in the overall site structure and display this information in its header.
  • Examples:
    • http://www.ifmasv.org/events/rsvpNew.php?eventId=37
    • http://www.ifmasv.org/chapter/leadership/committees2001.php
• Custom Error Pages
  • To ease migration from the old site, custom error pages redirect users to the new location for the information they are looking for -- instead of the user receiving a generic "404 Document Not Found" message.
  • Example:
    • http://www.ifmasv.org/award.htm
• Printer-Friendly Views
  • Each page can be viewed in a format specifically made for printing. At the minimum, the left-hand navigation is removed, but we could easily make other changes as well.
  • Compare:
    • http://www.ifmasv.org/events/index.php
    • http://www.ifmasv.org/events/index.php?printIt=true
• To improve reliability and reduce load on the database server, several common queries are cached and stored as serialized data on the web server.
• We built a custom PHP class to handle form inputs in a systematic way. When fields do not validate, an error message displays and the CSS class associated with the field name changes to highlight the error.
• The event calendar, job listing, and resource listing portions of the page are database driven. Anyone can post information, but only administrators can edit and authorize the data to be displayed on the site.
• HTML is validated by http://validator.w3.org
• To see how long it took the server to process a page, view the source and scroll to the bottom.

Results

Usability studies were conducted on the new site, and results were very positive. On first exposure to the site, respondents to the task-based questions were able to find the correct answer to 90% of the questions in under one minute, with well over 50% of the answers being located in 30 seconds or less.