After the initial phase of front-end development, the project ran into some resourcing issues, and I got pulled in to assist the back-end team by integrating my client-side code with the server-side Django system. Even though this wasn’t my forte, I inadvertently found myself in the position of knowing more about a specific area of the codebase – and despite slow progress and more than a few setbacks, the other team members and I pulled the site into shape so it could be handed back off to the client’s developers to take over.

IE8 and mobile layout proved a challenge, dealing with variations in css and javascript interpretation, but working with the back-end develop we managed to wrestle the whole thing into good shape by the deadline.

This presented an interesting challenge – each of the 5 photos automatically generates a new ‘user has posted photo to wall’ notification, resulting in as many as 5 duplicate posts. To solve this, the application had to check back several times after uploading (to compensate for varying response times between the user’s browser and facebook’s servers) and delete its own duplicate posts. We also had to deal with some lovely IE7 security-related behavior, solved by dropping javascript-based cookie authentication for the upload process and switching to pure PHP.

In addition to the app, there is a hidden backend that allows the DSW client to provide a password and download the contents of the MySQL database where the form submission data has been stored as an Excel spreadsheet.

• custom homepage template that integrates custom fields, pulls the latest entries from two different post categories, a rotating homepage banner utilizing the jQuery plugin jCarousel, and a content area that randomly displays one of an array of different messages.
• custom news and events template that displays a list of news article entries (also specified by post categories) and formats a list of upcomming events, managed on the back end by WordPress plugin WPListCal.
• subpages use two WordPress plugins, Yoast Breadcrumbs and YT Tree Menu, to generate navigation that allows the user to easily keep track of where they are in the site hierarchy.
• search engine visibility and traffic metrics are each managed by the excellent plugins WordPress SEO and Google Analytics for WordPress, respectively.

All things considered, the new Insignia Health website is an instructive example of how different web technologies (WordPress and jQuery,) and contributions from the community (plugins) can be folded together into a better experience for both the end user and the site administrator, creating an online presence that is truly greater than the sum of its parts.

The store section is run through a simple paypal interface, with a bit of additional jQuery scrolling effects to preserve the smoothness that had been present before in the flash animation tweens.

The blog section is pulled from a simple WordPress back-end, completely hidden from visitors, which allows the webmaster a simple way to keep that content up to date.

Included with the store page is a comprehensive step-by-step guide of how to log into PayPal, create a new product entry, generate the ‘add to cart’ code for that new item, and then add that to the existing page html.

Following designs from Ascentium, this app comes pre-loaded with official Cisco RSS feeds, which are synchronized with a corresponding web widget. There’s also space for the administrator to deploy timed messages in advance simply by adding a new entry to an XML document – once the date specified is reached, each installation of the RSS Reader will automatically display the new content.

In addition, the user is given the ability to add/remove/reorder their own RSS feeds through a simple control panel window.