NIH - National Cancer Institute (NCI)

The National Cancer Institute’s Benchmarks Newsletter is targeted to science writers, journalists and the general public. The articles cover the wide variety of research that is going on at NCI. NCI wanted to increase their reach and audience by leveraging the use of social media tools.

WebFirst's solution involved the re-development of the Benchmarks newsletter on the Wordpress (open source CMS package) platform. WebFirst designed the website and utilized custom Wordpress modules to develop an archive page for past newsletters. WebFirst also configured the system to allow for rapid uploads of animations, links to YouTube videos and a variety of other media types.

WebFirst created custom hooks into RSS feeds, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube. Moreover, a Twitter Widget was installed to allow users to see a scrolling list of real-time feeds that originate from NCI’s twitter page. WebFirst also created a Tagging and Category system that populates the Tag Cloud. WebFirst also customized the Wordpress search engine to display the search results with thumbnail and excerpt.

WebFirst also ensured that the site is W3C and Section 508 compliant. The new system creates a framework by which NCI staff can easily upload articles, utilizing Wordpress’ standardized workflow,. By using this workflow, productivity was improved and errors were reduced. The basic workflow allows contributors to write content and editors to review and publish the content. WebFirst also imported over 70 articles decisions in order to populate the database. The site was launched in November 2009.

Technologies Used: Wordpress, PHP, MySQL, Photoshop