BioCT

BioCT is the industry voice for bioscience in the state of Connecticut. The organization is dedicated to growing the bioscience ecosystem by supporting innovation, collaboration, networking, education, talent engagement and advocacy. They bring together companies, institutions, entrepreneurs, investors, government, service providers, and other passionate, dedicated people, to create a community to improve patients’ lives and public health, and drive economic growth. This project was completed in 2018 while I was employed at Taylor Design.

Industry

  • Bioscience

Tech Stack

  • WordPress
  • PHP
  • Bootstrap

Project Link

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Project Goals

Like most web projects, clients wanted an easy way to have a beautifully designed website, but still allows them to easily update the content themselves. Because they are such a large voice in the Connecticut bioscience scene, the website had to look very modern and dynamic. There are multiple important audiences to consider as well, and we had to make a website that dealt with all of them.

Technology and Build Choices

Our go to standard for an easy to use CMS was WordPress, so that is what we went with. To get the most out of WordPress, we paired it with a specialized managed WordPress web host that gets as much performance out of the platform as possible while still leaving the server management part of it user friendly.

Common WordPress theme functions were combined into a single theme functionality plugin. This keeps plugin overhead that could impact performance of the site negatively, down to a minimum.

To create easy to use and highly specific content editing dashboards, we used the Advanced Custom Field plugin.

As a community leader, BioCT needed a way to inform their audiences about various events it was holding, so I also integrated a full calendar and events system into the website. It allows them to display upcoming events on their homepage, has multiple calendar views, and allows visitors to subscribe to the calendar as well as individual events.

Development Process and Challenges Faced

In the case of the BioCT project, when development started, the design was still evolving, so I started with the basic site "skeleton" using the Twitter Bootstrap framework. I was able to get a rough prototype of certain layouts the designer was exploring quite fast using Bootstrap.

After the design was finished, I finished fleshing out the more complex pieces of it in HTML first, then we moved development over to be directly within WordPress.

Working with the client as they populated their content, we refined designs and how things functioned until we reached a finished state on our development server. When it was at a point it could be launched, we packaged up the site and migrated it to the client's web hosting.

Project Results

Years later, the BioCT website is still going strong and is actively maintained by their staff. I have been tasked with expanding and refining aspects of the website such as altering the main hero area on the homepage since the initial launch, but their staff continues to do an amazing job keeping up the original design we left them with.

This project consisted of many unique challenges for me such as integrating The Event Calendar event system by Modern Tribe seamlessly with the design, the creation of custom tailored data fields for no-code page and content management by the BioCT staff, and a custom theme functionality plugin that simplified many WordPress theme features.

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Let’s build something together

Photo of me, Chris Yerkes