KIPP Colorado - Encouraging Community Involvement

KIPP - the Knowledge is Power Program - is a network of free open-enrollment college preparatory public schools in under-resourced communities throughout the United States. KIPP Colorado opened its first Colorado school – Sunshine Peak Academy in 2002, and it’s second, KIPP Denver Collegiate High School, in August 2009. With the addition of a second school and plans for more in the future, KIPP Colorado needed a new website to help further its mission, with an objective of increasing support from the community in terms of volunteers and donations.

First, the theme

With a beautiful new design in hand from Bainbridge Studios, KIPP needed a Drupal shop to bring it to life. The site design consisted of a unique homepage layout, and a one and two-column sub-page layout. We started by creating the Drupal theme as a sub-theme of Zen. One of the more time-consuming aspects of theming this design was the implementation of graphic elements for the menus, including different colors for the rollovers:

We used the nice menus module for the drop-downs, and the menu class module to facilitate theming each menu parent individually.

Image links vs. text links

As is sometimes the case, design does not always serve functionality. When the site was themed and ready for the KIPP administrators to start adding content, KIPP realized that they needed to have control over the menu names, and that having to make new graphics for the menu text was not going to be feasible. We removed the graphics and styled the text as best we could, with the following results:

We also added a "Home" link above the logo and a search box on the top right, two items that were not in the design comp but were desirable features once the client was able to finally get their hands on a live version of their site.

By removing the image links, KIPP was able to rearrange their menu and sub-menu to create and better position their "Support Us" section.

Simple slide show

Another nice feature of the site is the home page slide show. This was set up so that KIPP can easily change the photos at any time by simply uploading and publishing new image content. Using some popular contributed modules and a jQuery plugin allowed us to resize uploaded images to the required dimensions, populate the page with them, and cycle through automatically. Specifically, this was built with Views, CCK, Imagefield, Filefield, Imagecache, and the jQuery Cycle plugin.

After the site launched, KIPP sent us this happy email:

"We are thrilled with the site and have already received several online donations as a result of the email that was sent announcing its launch! Thanks so much!"