Backstory

Wanting to become more involved in our community, we became members of a group called Denton County Young Professionals (DCYP) back in June. DCYP was started with a mission to strengthen the community and development of young professionals in Denton County. They do this by providing educational, social networking, and volunteer opportunities that will help develop its members into the next leaders of Denton County. The group was founded in December 2014 and is currently lead by a group who volunteers 100% of their time. Also, to become a member it was a small fee of $25 which 100% of went to the Wheeler House in Denton. Being part of this group has been a wonderful experience for us, and knowing that 100% of their dues go to charity and that their leadership completely volunteers their time, when we were asked to help out with some of their technology we didn’t have to think twice before saying yes!

The 1st Project

DCYP is always looking for things they can do to benefit their members. One of their recent ideas was the addition of a membership directory to their website so that members can more easily find and support each other. That’s where we came in. They have had a website up and running for a while now, so our task was simply to add the membership directory to the existing site. The directory needed to have a page containing a list of all members (who wanted to participate) and their profession, and a separate page for each member containing their contact info, bio, and picture. The main challenges here were: 1) trying to find a layout that would work with the varying length of text and different size images we’d be receiving from members, and 2) working within the limitations of the template used for the existing site. We played with several different layouts for the individual member pages before we landed on the one you can currently see below or on the site, here. The existing site was built using a Wordpress template so to get it to look and function the way we wanted it to – like being able to click on a row in a table instead of having to click on the person’s name – we had to add in some custom Javascript and CSS. Fortunately Wordpress makes it pretty easy to add in custom code, and it was a fun experience getting to do some things we hadn’t done with technology before.

Member list

Member page

Our Next Steps

We want to do everything we can to support this organization which adds a lot of value to our community, so we plan to continue helping them in any way that we can. We’re currently working to make some small changes to their website that we think will help get people more engaged, and our next big project will be working with them to streamline the registration process. They’ve experienced some challenges with their current process so we’ll be working to smooth it out making it easier for people to join and for the leadership team to manage in the background. With year end right around the corner, they’ll be asking everyone to renew their membership soon so we plan to have the changes in place to help make it a good start to the new year!