Mothers & Babies

Northwestern Mothers and Babies was another return client who came to us with one of their goals being to provide more downloadable resources for their users. They wanted to achieve this by allowing users to register on the website and essentially get full access to defined assets once they were logged in. 

Over time the project evolved, as they do, and the parameters of what needed to be created in order to serve the assets to users had to be modified. Instead of an on or off switch for the assets I had to build in an ability to mark each Resource as publicly accessible or not. Essentially not affected by the gate. Additionally the type of information that needed to be displayed with each resource was expanded to contain any combination of document, video, or audio. 

I worked through the new additions to the Resources component, but how the gated feature itself was devised was something I became proud of as it all came together. How it works is any Resource that is marked as gated will have the URLs of its assets contained within swapped out with dummy links. Upon being clicked the user is prompted to either register or log in to gain access. When the user is logged in the correct URL is then swapped in and access to the asset is granted! Pretty simple overall, but there is a lot more there that could be expanded upon which is part of the fun.

For example what if users with a certain user role could access a subset of the data over others? What if what was marked as gated could be used with more mobility throughout the site such as with a shortcode? Or how about if there was an option to just fill out a form and not become a user in order to gain access?

These questions and more always tend to linger in my mind once fun components like these are created. Unfortunately what tends to happen is the feature is needed as a one off and something like the creation of a plugin to port to another project wasn’t deemed necessary. Maybe one day!

Although I had no part in the creation of the design it was definitely a pleasure to build out and implement. I’m definitely proud of how accurate it is when viewed side by side to the static mockups. Of the many websites I’ve built over the years this is one of my favorite. I think it shows since we were recognized with a Web Excellence award and the client was very pleased with the end result.