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yourSABBATICAL

Online Community and Resources

We worked closely with the yourSABBATICAL team for several months to re-launch their website with a simplified site map and navigation scheme, a discussion forum, sophisticated homepage, and highlighted community-submitted content. The overall project included a visual redesign and simplification of the existing site and an expansion of the site's community features.

Cohesive community experience

WordPress and bbPress go together nicely. In fact, the user accounts and data can be shared between the two applications. This allowed us to rely on bbPress for user profiles, and WordPress for user authentication. Together, the experience is seamless and opaque to the user. Since users can submit guest blog posts, their profile is exposed in the footer to introduce visitors to the author. Additionally, the yourSABBATICAL team page is dynamically populated using the site profiles. All of this eliminates the need for content management in multiple areas.

Workplaces for Sabbaticals

One of the unique offerings is a annual list of workplaces that are sabbatical-friendly. We created custom page types and meta to extend WordPress as a content management system. Pages are the source for the company name, logo, description, etc. which can then be shared in many places across the site including the home page and the annual Workplaces for Sabbatical listing.

Simplified WordPress MU management

When you have two target audiences, it's always a challenge to make sure everybody gets to the right place. After a series of thoughtful consultations and new content and copywriting by yourSABBATICAL, we arrived at a simplified site map and structure. Using a custom link management plugin, yourSABBATICAL can easily manage navigation in the header and footer to direct employees and employers to the right spot.

The design process

Once we had a sense of the site's information architecture, the next step was to layout the content in a sensible way. After working through a series of wireframes for key content areas we moved onto the visual styling. Some styling and colors were borrowed from the existing yourSABBATICAL brand, but the rest of the styling was created from scratch to achieve a clean, professional web presence.

Sophisticated home page

The home page is a gateway to the rest of the site. Using widgets, editable snippets of text, and links lists, we were able to create a fully-customizable home page. Each column can be re-ordered and content areas can be easily swapped out using built-in WordPress functionality. Additionally, using post meta it's easy for the blog owner to highlight companies or blog posts right on the homepage. There's absolutely no need to edit any source code.

Look and feel of the forum

The discussion forums are a great place to ask and answer sabbatical-related questions. To avoid disjointing the site, we created a custom bbPress theme to best match the look and feel of the new yourSABBATICAL styling. Luckily, through the use of clean semantic markup much of the code could be borrowed from the WordPress theme.

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