As part of Georgia State University’s grant-funded role as the secretariat institution of the Association for Budgeting & Financial Management (ABFM) I led the re-design and deployment of the associations new website and membership management system.
The original site ran on an outdated instance of WordPress and relied on many deprecated plugins which necessitated a complete re-thinking of the site’s layout and functionality.
I exported the contents of the site’s database and used the resultant files to generate a sitemap which was circulated among the association’s executive committee. This sitemap was revised in three iterations, before an ultimate consensus was reached regarding the new site’s information architecture, shown below.
This site map was used as the basis for an entirely new instance of WordPress, which was installed on modern server hardware running the current version of PHP. The site was built out in a beta version during the winter of 2020-21 on the new server before launching on a production server in March 2021.
The new site features a recurring payment system, powered by WooCommerce, which will allow the ABFM treasurer and secretary to manage annual membership dues through an automated process including the fulfillment of physical and digital subscriptions to the organization’s periodicals.
Members of the executive committee also requested the addition of a resource library, which would allow them to share course syllabi and other documents with faculty and practitioners in their field. Using the WordPress Download Manager plugin I created a hierarchical document storage system and collaborated with the association’s secretary on a submission process for future resources via a form on the new website.
The re-design of the site began with Georgia State University’s acceptance of the secretariat position in June, 2020 and the new site was launched in March 2021. I will continue to maintain the site on behalf of Georgia State, as the secretariat, through the grant’s expiration in 2022.