Artimedia goes global

Artimedia assist New Zealand Buddhists!

We received this email recently from a user of our Web portal application and we were so pleased we requested his permission to quote the email:

 

'I'm from the Compassion Buddhist centre in Auckland and am responsible for keeping our end up to date. I just would like to thank you for your efforts on creating this fantastic website. Not only does it portray beautifully the information we'd like to display to the public but it's also easy for complete beginners (like myself) to keep up to date!

Suffice to say your efforts in helping put this together have been hugely appreciated by everyone up here.'

 

If you're wondering how come a Buddhist Centre in Auckland is happily using our software then read on... Some of you may be aware that Martin Luff, who worked as Artimedia's design manager for many years, left last year to go to New Zealand and we feared that would end our working relationship. However, the wonders of the Internet have meant that we are continuing to work together developing online communication projects - despite being seperated by nearly 12,000 miles.

The New Kadampa Tradition of Buddhism has over 800 centres in 37 countries and had already tried a number of other developers for their online communications within New Zealand. They have now settled on our application as the most suitable for their needs. This particular application is a web portal based on PHP and a MySQL database. For the last two years Artimedia has been working on a data-driven Website content management system specifically suited to the needs of voluntary and charitable organisations. Example functions are:-

• Information articles including images and pageing
• News stories
• Service and product catalogues
• Frequently asked questions lists
• File upload and download
• Document glossary and footnoting
• Printer-friendly presentation of content
• Searching and listing services such as training courses
• Message boad
• Logging data like time-sheets or expenses
• Contact forms

Throughout the development we have tried to make accessibility a top priority and by this we mean not only special needs accessibility but also accessibility in the broader sense of ease of use. We found a lot of other content management systems and portal products might be very fully-featured but tended to require that those responsible for updating content were technically literate - if not plain 'geeky'. Our system enables very rapid updating by non-technical staff - whilst not limiting those who have nore advanced skills. In many cases the visual design of other systems on the market seemed a bit of an afterthought, and can be very fussy and cluttered - which may be off-putting for many end users. So we spent some time working on a clean, attractive and uncluttered presentation of information. You can visit one of the New Zealand NKT Buddhist Centres to see the application in use: Compassion Buddhist Centre or Bodh Gaya Buddhist Centre. If you want to know more about the portal application get in touch with either Steve or Martin using our contact form.