Web Development

Northwest Independent Brokers Association 2017

In 2017 I was approached by the Northwest Independent Brokers Association to redesign their website from 2012, with a goal of creating a modern responsive website and adding additional features to the website for added member benefit. Using the goals of the Association I created a project proposal which exceeded their expectations and began work on the website redevelopment.

The first thing that changed was the design framework – I scrapped the previous HTML design and rebuilt the website using the bootstrap framework for responsive capabilities. The colors of the previous website were still desired, as well as the general overall layout, so putting together the new bootstrap design went fairly quickly.

After having the design settled, I moved forward with adding new features to the website, including a public meeting schedule, public events/continuing education platform, a more advanced public facing member listing feature and an improved member application procedure.

The member listing feature was totally reworked to allow for multiple office locations, public facing brokerage profiles, and the ability for brokerage owners to add their agents and team members to their listings. The public facing broker listing pages was enhanced to include search capabilities to find brokerages within a certain distance from an address, brokerages based on specialties and by property type they worked with.

The meetings schedule was made public, and the home page features the next upcoming meeting with a link to the meetings page which lists all scheduled meetings. Using a daily task, the website automatically removes meetings after their meeting date so only up to date and current information in displayed on the page.

The events listing feature also received a complete overhaul, allowing for the general information about the event, but now also including event contact information, location maps, multiple ticketing options, resource uploads, the ability to make events member only and an improved, easier to use checkout system.

The online application system of the previous website did not allow for automatic creation of accepted members, which was an issue that I wanted to tackle head-on to make the onboarding of new members easier for the associations administrators. I redeveloped the application process to collect all of the information about the applicant and their brokerage during signup, added user account creation and broker profile creation in the application process and provided for the creation of a payment profile. Once the application was submitted the association as well as the applicant received confirmation emails, and if the applicant is accepted the association admins now simply click a button to approve the membership and the new members profile and login are set active, their membership dues are billed and they are emailed with confirmation of their acceptance. This was a huge improvement over the old system which would require administrators to create a user account for all new applicants accepted and then manually email them their login information.

The members only section of the website received a complete overhaul and a ton of new features as well, including a member forum allowing for private forum conversations for members, a resource library where admins can upload and make available for download documents, forms, publications and more. A profile management system which allows for the addition of additional business locations, linking to social media and websites, and the addition of agents and staff which receive their own logins and personal profiles.

The payment system for the association was moved away from PayPal and converted to Stripe which enabled me to create recurring billing profiles and account management features allowing for members to see all of their previous transactions, manage their payment cards on account, and easily pay their membership dues manually or enroll in one of the AutoPay subscriptions. By switching to Stripe processing I was also able to create a bank style account summary for the administration and develop a charge terminal to accept manual payments from the website.

Many additional features were included in this website, too many to list. The development time on this project ended up being about five months, including all design, development, testing and training. During the course of this project I used the entire toolbox of skills from HTML and CSS to SQL database creation and design, .Net programming, Google map services, JavaScript, AJAX, and more.

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