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Websites: North American Interfraternal Foundation
The North American Interfraternal Foundation is a small non-profit association located in Indianapolis, Indiana. The association turned Carden Jennings Publishing to develop its first website.
Resources,
time, and technology know-how had been NIF's greatest barriers to constructing
an online presence. Through a series of weekly meetings, I met with their
executive director to come up with a list of site objectives. Clearly
the two most important objectives were increasing awareness of NIF's scholarships
and enabling students to submit their financial aid applications online.
By simply creating an online presence, NIF dramatically increased its exposure to students seeking financial aid. Careful search engine submittals and a strong use of META tags has drastically increased the number of applications receives each year.
The
site featured a very simplistic and clean design. NIF was not interested
in posting volumes of content or adding dazzling graphics. Instead, it
wanted a clean design that would offer easy navigation toward its online
forms and applications.
NIF offers four scholarships and two grants, all of which require lengthy applications. The applications are processed via an open-source Perl script called SouperMail. I was able to use SouperMail to store the results of a submitted form to a simple database, email a customized HTML-formatted thank you note to the visitor confirming receipt, and forward another HTML-formatted email containing the visitor's application to the proper NIF staff for processing.
According to NIF's executive director, their website has exceeded their objectives and expectations.
| Client: | North American Interfraternal Foundation |
| Type of work: | Carden Jennings Publishing Client |
| Description: | Design and develop the association's first website |
| Project role: | From sales to site launch, I was the sole CJP employee to work on this site and account. I met with NIF staff to determine their needs and objectives, created proposals for design and development, organized the site's information architecture, and developed all images and code. |
| Tools used: | Macromedia Dreamweaver, Macromedia Fireworks, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe ImageReady, Adobe Acrobat, SouperMail |
| Languages used: | HTML, DHTML, CSS, Perl, CGI |
| Server resources: | Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) mod_attach/0.9 PHP/4.2.2 mod_log_bytes/0.3 FrontPage/5.0.2.2510 mod_ssl/2.8.9 OpenSSL/0.9.5a on Linux |
| Size of site: | 50 pages, 14 GIFs, 22 JPGs, 6 PDFs |
| Conformance: | 
|
| Website: | www.nif-inc.net |