The Social Planning and Research Council of British Columbia or SPARC BC is a non-profit organization which was established in 1966 and it has been operating since then.

SPARC BC collaborate and work with many communities and organizations on matters and issues related to

• Accessibility
• Community Development Education
• Income Security
• Community Social Planning

SPARC BC is probably best known as the organization that issues the well-know blue parking permits for the disabled drivers.

SPARC BC's website is powered by Joomla! content Management System (CMS). Joomla! is one of the finest Open Source CMS solutions in the world as well as being a great Web Application Development framework.

Visually Impaired Accessible

The new SPARC website has been designed and developed according to the Web Content Accessiblity Guidelines. That means the content is also accessible to the visually impaired users

Managing Large Number of Documents

SPARC BC has a large and growing collection of documents on their website's Resources & Publication's section. Previsouly they were using DocMan Joomla! extension to manage and organize documents on their site.

However as effecient as DocMan was, it had far too many features that were hardly used by the SPARC BC staffs. Therefore it cluttered up their system. All they wanted was an easy way to upload and organize their documents and an ability to link them to the articles.

As a result, we developed the RubberDoc extension which does only that! RubberDoc is developed for the native Joomla! 1.5 and it is currently available for free under the GPL license for everybody to use.

 Search Engine Optimization

Based on WCA guidlines, we developed a theme that renders CSS only pages. Ocassionally HTML tables are used to display tabular data. As the result all pages are easily and effeciently indexed by the Search bots. In addition Joomla! by default creates Search Engine Friendly (SEF) urls that contiain keyworks. We have also installed an extension which dynamcially creates a google Sitemap.

the combination of a highly search-engine optimized CMS and some training on how to write and maintain search engine friendly contents have grealy improved the SPARC BC website ranking in the organic search results.

Credits

• Rastin Mehr from rmd Studio - Information Architecture, CMS Custom Development, Consulting, and Training.
• Ash Sanieyan from PeerGlobe Technology - Web Application Development and great help in optimizing the Javascript code in the SPARC template, contributing to the development of RubberDoc Document Management Extension, and much more.
• Jeannette Duguay from JenTekk Web Solutions , for testing and documentation of RubberDoc extension and the SPARC BC's template.
• Lindsay Hindle, Communication Coordinator of the SPARC BC. who spent time with us from the beginning to the final stages of this project contributing to the ideas, content entry, and overall development of the project.
• Joanne Cheung, Graphic Designer at SPARC BC. Thank you for contributing great ideas and helping us on content maintenance and testing during the first week of website's launch