509 Creative and Lars Ames, is proud to show our latest custom responsive website for completed for Carson Tahoe Health.
[caption id="attachment_1735" align="alignleft" width="883"]
The new face of Carson Tahoe Health on the web[/caption]
A year ago we built a custom WordPress blog for CTH which we nested into their custom content management system and wrapped it to look native. For some of us in the industry the term Custom CMS is kind of a derogatory term. A custom CMS is one for which support is hard to come by and expensive, updates are seldom seen and security holes are a fact of life. CTH got a glimpse of the ease-of-use of WordPress and eventually they wanted that for their whole web platform.
We worked with Carson Tahoe Health to come up with some solutions that work with the native functionality of WordPress to build a solid website on a CMS that will work for them forever. Yeah, some day WordPress will die, but by then we’ll all be communicating telepathically, so no biggie. Here’s what we did:
Updated Design
I won’t say the site was an entirely new, ground-breaking design, but the client wanted to keep the basic feel of the site the same while updating the usability and looks. We updated the layout on the 960 grid and re-spaced the layout and content organization overall through the wire framing process. Then David Evans of 509 Creative applied an updated design make the new site look a lot better without looking like a completely new site to it’s users.
Responsive Design with Easy Contact
So last summer I separated my shoulder down in Gardnerville (bike crash) and was looking for an emergency room on my phone. I brought up the site for CTH but there was no phone number easily found, so I just went to Carson Valley Med. On carsontahoe.com now the phone number is big and easy to click to open the phone app and dial.
The menus all work on mobile with the hamburger icon and drop downs. All the content scales to fit and works no matter what size screen you are using. (not tested on iWatch…)
Smart Menus
Yes, WordPress has the ability to set as many menus as you want and put them wherever you want. But managing menus for each of CTH’s 19 medical service categories and each services sub-service would be cumbersome. So we built the Quick Links side menu to be conditional. If the page you are viewing has no child pages, then it shows the quick links WordPress menu. If the page does have child pages, then it shows those child pages. They edit the Quick Links menu like any other WP menu and the page menus by adding or deleting pages. [caption id="attachment_1742" align="alignnone" width="695"]
Conditional menus are easier to manage than a unique WordPress menu for each page.[/caption]
Physician Directory
All of the physicians in the CTH system are entered into WordPress as a custom post type and are displayed on a physicians directory. The directory is searchable by keyword and sortable by specialty.
Donations and eCommerce
The Carson Tahoe Health Foundation was previously a separate site at Carsontahoe.org. We used the WooCommerce platform, which was just acquired by Automattic, which owns WordPress. So what had been the best WP shopping cart solution is now more or less a native WordPress app! Donors can donate an amount of their choosing and select to have it applied to a service of their choosing. They plan on adding other products and merchandise in the future.
As a side note, the site is also Internet Explorer 8 Compatible. Some of Carson Tahoe Health’s internal systems rely on IE 8 and so we made site compatible with the obsolete browser.
-Mike]]>