World Affairs Council of Philadelphia Website

Overview

Wacphila.org is an informational website for the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia, designed by Philly-based marketing agency FVM.

This client had complicated branding requirements which dictated a theme of 70° angles for horizontal edges of many site components.

The site facilitated a few of the client's value propositions, which were primarily to implement a revenue generating catalog of worldwide tours the client leads, to gather donations, membership applications, and to facilitate signups for schools to their core educational program. The site also needed to showcase events that the client hosted.

Solution

We decided to use advanced page builder technology to allow the client to edit content within the site, even though it did create some obstruction in the implementation of the desired branding.

We built a custom filtering system to showcase the catalogue of worldwide tours, to facilitate ease of searching since the client hosts many ongoing tours, and the tours had some unique search criteria which weren't possible without expensive premium filter systems.

We integrated an advanced forms system to gather donations, and facilitate signups to the client's core educational program.

Implementation Details

The site was developed using WordPress with Elementor page builder.

We had to budget a large amount of time upfront in the project to experiment with advanced styling to satisfy the requirement for 70° angles on the graphical components.

Custom post types were developed to showcase the client's video series, events series, and worldwide tours. Custom coding was implemented to facilitate filtering on all custom post types since the tours system demanded the application of custom code for their unique filter system, and it wouldn't have made budgetary sense to implement a separate filtering system in addition to that custom system.

The site was integrated with FormAssembly using a JavaScript integration to facilitate the implementation of the donation, membership, and school signup forms with the branding of the site.

We also ran into significant challenges during the publish of the site which required deep troubleshooting of the MySQL database to reveal the source of the problem. The security plugin used had actually corrupted the database during development and the publish was completed by clean uninstalling this plugin before the publish and then reinstalling it on the production server.