Primary Concerns:
The Virginia Department of Forestry

A primary concern was not just a fresh new look, but also maintaining the hundreds of forms, documents, and brochures available to the public. The goal was to make those documents easy to locate and keep them up-to-date.

Also critical was helping the Virginia public easily find the forester that services their location. Since most existing agency directories were in alphabetical order, the process of finding the right person often involved multiple calls, long waits, and much frustration.

Lastly, for the website to remain current, it would need to be maintained by many departments and people of various skill levels. Making maintenance easy, and carefully and selectively providing users access to the backend was important. Because of the ease-of-use, I selected WordPress as the platform for this redesign.

Solution:
Resource Library

To maintain the DOFs more than 1200 documents, I implemented a robust Resource Library. Each resource (the forms, brochures, maps, logos, digital resources, and so on ) was entered into the library and tagged and categorized by the DOF staff. A thumbnail image was generated dynamically to avoid them having to create their own. Once entered, the resource will appear anywhere that the tags or categories were referenced. Updating documents is a matter of looking for the existing entry and uploading the new file.

A variety of shortcodes were built so that the web page editors could pull in subsets of the library either by category, tag, ID, or combination. Taxonomies were also added to differentiate between public and private documents. This was important because part of the development effort was a protected intranet site that exists as part of the public site.

Solution:
Find a Forester

I built an HR module to support a new public Agency Directory. Like the Resource Library, the public can now locate individuals by name, location, keyword, or department. Additionally, by using custom taxonomies, the DOF staff could tag the appropriate employees as either Primary or Secondary Foresters for the county they serve.

That custom taxonomy is referenced prominently on the homepage as a select box. The Virginia public can simply choose their country, click Search, and immediately see the person they need to call.

Solution:
Robust Role Management & Training

During the discovery process, user roles were identified for the individuals who would be maintaining the various aspects of the website. This included roles for HR, Finance, Business Management, Procurement Officers, and those responsible for updating Daily Fire Danger reports.

Easy-to-follow tutorials, both written and quick start videos, were created for each role so those users would feel confident maintaining their portion of the website. For security, extreme care was also taken to ensure that these individuals could only access their specific area of the WordPress administrative area.