Officer Tyron Franklin was shot and killed after being identified as a police officer during a robbery attempt at a local fast food restaurant. He was paying for his food when a robber approached him and demanded his money. During the ensuing struggle, the robber produced a handgun and shot him four times. The shooter then shot him two more times as he lay on the ground after a witness yelled at him saying the victim was an officer.
Of all the nonprofit sites I’ve worked on lately, my last project was probably the one that came with the most emotionally captivating story. It’s timing, was also probably the most coincidental, reason being that the passing of the young police officer that the website was meant to commemorate happened within weeks of the passing of my Father.
I usually begin designing every website by trying to tap into the ‘mission’ of the website for inspiration. Who’s the audience? Who are the owners? What do these parties want to see, feel and remember the moment they land on the homepage? It just so happened that this time, having to build a site in memory of a loved one who had passed was a task that I could generate inspiration for from my own experience.
I would have wanted a site that did not seek to patronize my feeling of loss. A bright colored tribute with oodles of visual panache would have done little to help abate my grief. I would have wanted a site that was more of a monument, or a salute to a life well lived–probably a site that didn’t try too hard to accomplish this. This was my inspiration for OfficerTyronFranklin.org
In the backend, I added some new features to the Nonprofit Manager as well. To help the Officer Tyron Franklin foundation keep track of it’s donors, I created a Donor classification and archiving system, that would allow administrators to create a category of donation based on a range (eg. $50 – $100: Gold Circle
I also made the Page Management feature more efficient. In older versions of the Nonprofit manager, if a user created a page of type ‘Component’, a user then had to manually type in the name of the component.
In this version, once a user creates a component page, a dropdown list shows up with all the components that a user can select from. Also, whereas a the old version did not allow a user to change from a page from one type to the other once it had been created, this version makes that possible from right within the datagrid.
Another neat feature is that, now after you have created all the pages on your site, you can actually just select one of them to be your front page.
Check out the modified Nonprofit Manager user manual here.