1. Introduction
1.1 Background
11.5 million children in India are impacted by developmental disabilities, making it rank at the top across the globe for developmental disabilities in children.
Despite this, there is a dearth of professionals who can assist such children and their families. Recently, there has been a marked rise in the number of medical and non-medical professionals who play a substantial role in creating a robust support system for developmentally disabled children. However, such professionals continue to function in a scattered way with very limited resources being available on how to reach them and engage with them.
1.2 About the Client
Nayi Disha is a non-profit organization whose name roughly translates to a new direction or a new path. Headquartered in Hyderabad, its mission is to become a life-long partner for families impacted by Autism and other developmental disabilities. Nayi Disha bridges this gap by creating a multi-lingual platform that brings together families of disabled children and professionals and other resources that can help them.
Creating impact with IT and investing in technology for good has always been a priority for us here at Development Logics. The leaders of Nayi Disha reached out to us in March 2020 to help them carry out some major improvements to their website.
2. Challenges and Requirements
2.1 Migration to WordPress
Nayi Disha’s existing website was built on an old version of Drupal (v6) which was making the website slow, unappealing, and expensive to maintain. Hence, they wanted to migrate the website to WordPress.
2.2 Making the Content More Searchable
Furthermore, the website was content-rich and stocked with highly relevant and useful information. These ranged from specialty-wise directories of professionals and other service providers as well as updates on events that were available location-wise. They also had blogs by professionals as well as families of differently abled children along with curated content categorized by the type of disability.
They needed all this content to be structured into 4 major heads – Resources, Directory, Community, and Events – such that the entire content becomes more searchable, accessible, and discoverable.
2.3 Progressive Web App
They were also looking for a Progressive Web App (PWA) to enable their website to provide instant updates and engage their users better.
3. Our Approach
3.1 Website Migration
Having dedicated a team of 5 including a Team Lead, a Quality Analyst, a Project Manager, and 2 Developers, we embarked on an 18-month-long journey to make this project a success. Migrating a website of this size and complexity to WordPress turned out to be a challenge in itself in the initial stages. We constantly collaborated with the client’s team and kept them updated with the developments and progress each week.
3.2 Content Display and UI
On the UI front, it was a massive learning experience for us to be able to enable the content display to pan out uniformly across all browsers and devices, each of which has its own requirements and nuances.
The directories and events had to be locally synced by detecting the user’s location with her/his content. We further augmented the text content, i.e. blogs, articles, and reports had to be augmented with advanced Amazon-like text-based search features, multi-factor filtering, paywall for premium content, and aspirational features that popped up after content consumption, like rating, reviews, and sharing.
3.3 Progressive Web App
Creating a PWA for the website required us to build into it advanced caching capabilities. We were able to achieve a very short loading time, enabling the website to perform well even in spotty networks, and have app-like features (like options to add a shortcut to the home screen and push notifications).
3.4 Registration and Payment Integration
Other features of the website included separate registration modules for patient families and professionals and seamless integration with the Razorpay payment gateway to implement the e-Donation Box feature.
4. Learnings
One of the most intricate features of the website was to classify and segment the content for easy filtering and access by the readers. The website attracts a vast range of audiences, mostly parents and caregivers of differently-abled children.
The various resources on the website like blogs and articles, directories of professionals, and events, were made available by our team with the option of filtering across age groups and health conditions.
Further, premium content was separated from generally accessible content, while directories and event lists were also accessible using filters for geography and locality.
All of these required complex programming and structuring of logic at our end which required added man-hours and also stretched the timeline of the project a bit.
Conclusion
Due to the limited budget available for the project from the client’s end, many additional features and functionalities had to be excluded. However, the end result is a complete turnaround from the client’s original website and has greatly improved the user experience of its direct and indirect beneficiaries. We look forward to taking on more projects that focus on creating a positive impact on society at large through innovative initiatives.