TransplantBuddies.org Homepage

Forum Landing Page 
 
 

Mental Notes:

TransplantBuddies.org is a website that serves the transplant community. Started by a transplant recipient, the site has grown to include extensive transplantation resources, message boards, news, and recipient and donor personal stories. Mental Models was brought in in late 2007 to perform a reskin of the site to give it a new visual design and more modern look, and to take over hosting and ongoing administration and maintenance.

This is an example of a site that had to be implemented in a manner facilitating effective use by a wide-ranging international user community. The site consisted of content as well as interactive message boards provided through a Forum software application. Users could find information and resources on the transplant process, transplant organizations and services, drugs, support groups/blogs, etc., as well as participate in discussions about living life as a transplant patient.

The new visual design was implemented on both content and forum pages, with consideration given to optimizing viewing across various browsers/resolutions to meet the diverse needs of the user community. During implementation, several tweaks to the initial design were made in order to provide a high-quality viewing experience across the site in different browsers. The effort also included an update of the Forum software and a very structured move from the old production system to the new production/hosting environment to ensure that all recent message board posts were captured and brought to the new hosting environment.

Once the new design and production system was in place, Mental Models served as webmaster for hosting and ongoing administration/maintenance for the site through the first half of 2008, after which the owner of the site took over.

Mental Models is committed to furthering use of the web for meaningful purposes beyond commerce; TransplantBuddies.org is one of several clients Mental Models works with at reduced rates or pro bono hours to support their worthy efforts.