Research Design Connections

The Situation: Research Design Connections wanted to replace their iProduction site with one that offered them more control over their newsletter service and related e-mail messages. They also wanted to eliminate the need to use HTML and greatly decrease the need to rely on a Web developer to make changes to their site.

The Problem: Research Design Connections (RDC)
was under a tight deadline. They needed to replace their current site and move all content to a new system before the end of 2009. Since they sent newsletters on a quarterly basis, they needed to make sure that their subscribers received uninterrupted service.

Our Solution: Drupal provided RDC with the flexibility they needed to create password-protected content, a blog, public content, and a subscription and newsletter service all within the same site. We completed the entire project in 3 months. We mimicked portions of the design from the iProduction site and improved upon others. We converted over 700 pages of content and blog postings into the new site while maintaining images, links, keywords, and key Web site paths. The current issue of their publication is organized with a prominent cover story image and story sections in a magazine-like format. Titles and story snippets are publicly visible while full stories are only available to subscribers. Archives can be searched by topic. Regular subscribers can subscribe and renew on the site. RDC staff can create special subscriptions from their administrative panel. Since some workflow items require multiple steps, we developed online help documentation and a custom administrative menu only accessible to RDC staff.

The Result: Research Design Connections has more control over their newsletter and the e-mail messages that it generates. They can post regularly to their blog and submit new stories without needing to use any HTML.