We are pleased to announce that we have just made the new website for ALCI (Association of Lactation Consultants in Ireland) live!
ALCI was founded 25 years ago , the purpose of the association is to promote the professional development of International Board Certified Lactation Consultants (IBCLC) for the benefit of breastfeeding infants and children, mothers, families and the wider community.
You can find out more information about their goals, the ALCI constitution, representatives and ALCI council here!
Our Brief
Our job at Surge was to take over of the re-branding, logo design and website design tasks for ALCI. They wanted something new, fresh, contemporary and easy to use. And we delivered.
Logo Design
ALCI needed a new logo and branding for their website. Surge took care of this by working closely with ALCI on various logo concepts and designs, and trying various colour schemes. All of us wanted something simple, to the point , contemporary , easy on the eye, and most importantly something that reflected who ALCI are.
Custom Features
The new ALCI site was built on WordPress which is the most popular and easy to use Content Management System available online. However we had to go deeper than that to achieve our objectives. So we wrote some plugins and did a few WordPress hacks.
Google Maps API Integration
Surge wrote a plugin that integrates with the Google Maps API to allow ALCI to manage their private practice members. The purpose of the plugin was to allow a user to search for a member with the help of a map , the result being a generated list with all member information and distance from the search point.
Check it out here.
It needed to be easy to use from both an end user perspective and from ALCIs perspective.
Event Booking and Membership Application
While there’s no direct e-commerce or online selling on the site, we still needed to have a means of transactions. ALCIs old system for event booking was through email contact and taking credit card details. Users can now book directly on their website using a Surge custom form that’s directly linked to Paypal. This handles the entire process for ALCI.
We applied an equivalent form to allow ALCI members and potential members to apply for or renew their membership. The entire process is now handled online including the management of certificate uploads and of course the payment process itself.
Mobile/Responsive Design
We now believe it is a given that a site needs to be mobile compatible, we’ve all come to a stage online where its just annoying and outdated to land on a regular desktop version of a site when using your phone.
We built ALCI to respond to its browser size, be it a large desktop, a tablet or a tiny a mobile phone.
It was great working with ALCI and we wish them the very best in the future. Be sure to check our their site www.alcireland.ie and their facebook page.
