Site Launch: World Hepatitis Alliance
by Mike Badgley on May 3, 2010
This past week we launched a Web site redesign for the World Hepatitis Alliance.
The World Hepatitis Alliance is a non-governmental organisation that represents approximately 280 hepatitis B and C patient groups from around the world. As a coalition of advocacy groups, the World Hepatitis Alliance is a global voice for the 500 million people worldwide living with chronic viral hepatitis B or C.
This was a large undertaking due to the amount of content and functionality that was required, including:
- Blogging: Multiple country-based (currently four – Canada, UK, Australia and Portugal) multilingual blogs.
- Social media: Tagged content from Twitter, YouTube and Flickr, as well as content (news and events) that are produced directly on the site, into one nice package called the Online Scrapbook.
- Profile Wall: A space where user’s can share their story and inspire change. Scroll through lists of profiles to view the stories of others – available in seven distinct languages.
- Interactive Map: Allow users to find out what’s happening (news, events and support) in their region.
The architecture that this Web site was built on was Sitefinity, and again it was a case where were extremely happy with the choice in using this production for our site build. The majority of our custom development (based on the required functionality in the list above) were either based or used existing controls that come packaged with the CMS.
During the development we built a custom tool for handling the social media aspect of the site. It works like Yahoo! Pipes but adds an extra level of manageability to allow a content manager the ability to approve each content piece that comes through the ‘pipe’ before its made available to the Web site.
Props go to Kris Blazejewicz, a Senior Developer here at High Road Communictions who was the lead in developing this application.
