Maine Commission for Community Service
Monday, January 26th, 2009The Maine Commission for Community Service works to get people involved in volunteer activities throughout the state. The Commission’s site, at MaineServiceCommission.gov, is the place where they report to the public and their stakeholders how effective they’ve been in achieving their goal.
Last week Pemaquid launched a new and improved site for the Commission. Our main objectives:
Create a more up-to-date, professional image. The creative available from MCCS was limited. It consisted of a logo created in house. We developed a hi-res version of the logo so they could use it in other materials, and then we created the layout and color palette around it.
Improved content management. The Commission stores literally hundreds of reports and publications on the site. They publish events, photo galleries, news releases, and they have a fairly unique way of posting information about goings-on, called Maine Volunteer Fare. That and other content is handled with a custom version of the Pemaquid Content Manager, our home-cooked CMS.
Accessibility. As a state agency, the MCCS must adhere to the Maine’s Accessibility Policy, which sets fairly high standards for meeting the needs of the visually/physically impaired. As always, our intent was to ensure accessibility without compromising the elegance of the site’s design concept. We think we’ve done that.
There are a bunch of other goodies reflecting the latest techniques: the jQuery Cycle plug-in is used to rotate the home page “marquee slides”; and for the first time we used css_browser_selector.js as a means to serve up different styles depending on the browsers (we used it mainly to adjust the navigational font in IE (further reading on CSS browser selector, many thanks to Jen Ecker for dropping this into the codebase).
Executive Director Maryalice Crofton and Public Relations Representative Rochelle Runge are a joy to work with and Pemaquid will continue to assist the MCCS with ongoing content development and by providing hosting for the site (Pemaquid also hosts another Commission site, VolunteerMaine.org). We’re proud to support their mission of fostering community service activities and a spirit of volunteerism in Maine.
