Growing Venture Solutions - GVS - Education

Harvard Magazine

Ezra — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 02:44:26 +0000

Harvard Magazine needed an ecommerce solution for selling text advertisements that vary in price according to the content of the text. GVS built an Ubercart payment gateway to support the CyberSource Hosted Order Page API, allowing Harvard to process payments offsite. GVS contributed the payment gateway back to the Ubercart core project, as well as enhancements to the UC_Node_Checkout module that was used to sell the customized advertisements.

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Denver Spanish House

evelyn — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 20:39:14 +0000

Initial Project: Basic Site And Building Archives

DSH has a limited budget for advertising and had search engine optimization as a major goal. So, the purpose at first was simply to get content online to help build authority for keywords related to the site. This is when the movies, books, music, and wines sections were created. Those sections are now secondary to the main content on the site, but still bring in a fair amount of interested visitors and certainly helped to build search engine ranking for some of the main keywords important to the site.

Visual Pop: Making the Denver Spanish House Theme Fit the Brand

The next step was to really make the site attractive. Since DSH's brand is based on the idea of exploring culture in a rich, comfortable environment the site itself had to be visually attractive. Fortunately, the DSH had a large bank of photos to draw from, a great logo from 2fold Studio, and a few instructions to drive the design. The result is a rounded corner design that keeps the culture front and center in the form of "banners".

The banners at the top of most pages on the site are sliced out of photos taken by the DSH. They rotate randomly so that visitors can enjoy a wide variety of images.

Final Steps - Classes and Information Architecture on the Front Page

After a brainstorming session where we ranked the most important things to communicate to the customers we created a wireframe of the front page: classes at the top, then an "about" block and then Nikki herself, followed by lower priority topics. Some quick work with blocks, views, and panels and all of the site features and old pieces of content are pulled into no more than 1 click from the front page.

Denver Spanish House - Another Satisfied Customer

Nikki, the founder of Denver Spanish House, had this to say about the project:

"I love my website: it's dynamic, functional, and looks great! It's easy for me to add information, which allows me to be in control of my business and gives my clients the most up-to-date information. My website has been a great tool for my business. Not only has it been a great source of marketing but also a complete source of information for my customers. It's clear that Greg was not only concerned with building a great website, but the foundation for a successful business."

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KIPP Colorado

evelyn — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 03:30:17 +0000

The Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) is a network of free open-enrollment college preparatory public schools in under-resourced communities throughout the United States. Today there are 82 KIPP schools in 19 states and the District of Columbia serving over 20,000 students. KIPP Colorado has two schools in Colorado with more planned for the future. With their growth and success came the need for a new website to further raise awareness of their mission.

With a beautiful new design in hand from Bainbridge Studios, KIPP needed a Drupal shop to bring it to life. We created the Drupal theme and configured several features, including a rotating photo block on the home page, a newsletter sign up box and an event calendar. We were conscious of setting up the site so that as KIPP opens more schools in the future it will be a simple matter for them to add new pages for those schools.

After the site launched, KIPP sent us this happy news:
"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!"

We have also written an in-depth case study of the KIPP Colorado site.

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AUSSIE (Australian United States Services in Education)

evelyn — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:56:44 +0000

AUSSIE provides professional development workshops to over 400 schools, and wanted to collect attendee information and fees on their Drupal site without relying on the external Eventbrite service. GVS integrated Ubercart, Drupal's cornerstone E-commerce system, with Signup, the premiere Events registration module. The resulting UC_Signup module, makes it easy for attendees to register for events and pay registration fees.

With different combinations of attendees and events, events registration can be complicated for end-users and site administrators. So far, hundreds of sites have switched to uc_signup for its smooth registration workflow and easy setup.

GVS also conducted usability testing on UC_Signup, resulting in several issues that were submitted to the Ubercart project.

As part of ongoing support work, GVS has provided enhancements to Ubercart's discount functionality.

This project was completed in partnership with Dtek Digital Media.

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Arapahoe Community College

evelyn — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:40:46 +0000

Arapahoe Community College (ACC) website had been designed and maintained in Dreamweaver for years before undergoing a major redesign and redevelopment in 2009. The new design created a consistent look-and-feel throughout the site and integrated more imagery on key pages.

ACC and the designers determined that using a CMS would be the best way to maintain the site in the future for the sake of better aesthetic consistency and delegation of content authoring. Growing Venture Solutions was hired to help build the new website in Drupal and provide training and support for the College staff.

GVS worked closely with ACC's staff to carefully develop content moderation practices that would allow many different authors to participate with migrating content from the old site and easily integrate images into the specific page templates. In a matter of a few weeks, the staff added over 1000 pages of content.

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University Corporation for Atmospheric Research

evelyn — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:23:31 +0000

The University Center for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) in Boulder has adopted Drupal as an organization-wide standard for deploying websites. One of the intranet sites UCAR needed was a system for managing the tutorials and FAQs that help administrative employees navigate through the center's guidelines, processes and procedures.

Growing Venture Solutions worked with stakeholders from across the organization to design a knowledge management system to reduce the work for administrators and to improve access to relevant information. GVS also trained in-house web developers and designed an efficient workflow for transferring existing content into the new Drupal site.

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