Health and Disabilities Working Group (HDWG) is a research, technical assistance and training program of the Boston University School of Public Health that addresses the health care needs of critically-challenged populations. HDWG oversees three major projects: Catalyst Center, the Evaluation Center for HIV and Oral Health (ECHO) and the Peer Education and Evaluation Resource Center (PEER Center).
Each of these programs requires a website to disseminate research and information to the public. But each project also needs to communicate on a regular basis with its grantees regarding conferences, trainings and meetings. Until 2007, most of this communication was handled by email and phone.
Over a course of a year, we moved the four Dreamweaver sites—which co-existed in the same directory, but had no visual or technical relationship to each other except for a simple link—into the Drupal content management system. We used Drupal’s special multi-site installation, creating sub-sites for each of the 3 major projects. The four different sites now share the same underlying code base, which simplifies maintenance as the software and content evolve to meet new organizational needs.
As of 2008, two of the sub-sites have their own intranets with distinctive features including conference calendars, forums, sign-up for meetings, webcast trainings and document sharing that are administered by program staff. At the same time, all of the sub-sites share a common library of resources (documents, reports, articles, etc.) so that researchers, students, teachers and medical practitioners can browse through resources available across all HDWG projects from the HDWG site or just view the resources relevant to the specific project.
To meet the challenge of giving the site a unified organizational identity while still preserving the distinctiveness of each of its programs, our designer redesigned the main HDWG site, and then introduced simple changes to color, typography and page design to tie the other three sites together. Visitors move between the programs and feel the connection to the website of HDWG, the parent organization.
AS HDWG staff become familiar with the power of the Drupal content management system, the opportunities to expand the features and functionality of the website to facilitate communication with, and among, grantees and to share valuable research and information with the general public have grown enormously.
