Friends of the Library

It always feels good to launch a site for a client with a mission we heartily support. Friends of the Library of Montgomery County is just such a client, as there’s a long history with books, libraries, and publishing amongst Heatherstone staff.

There are a host of features that made building this site particularly interesting. FOLMC needed the ability to display upcoming events, support local chapters through announcements, accept donations and sell memberships, provide directions to the libraries and bookstores, and provide secured areas to distribute information to help chapter leaders and librarians in their roles.

While there were some WordPress plugins out there that would support embedding both Google Maps and Google Calendar, there were a couple of things we wanted to be able to do to make it easier for FOLMC staff to work with these, so we wrote our own. Our calendar plugin, for example, supports multiple calendars easily so staff can do a mash-up of general events and those presented by a specific chapter on the chapter pages.

The best part for FOLMC staff has been the ability to manage their own content directly (via WordPress) that we build into every Foundation Website we develop. There was a day, a few weeks after we were first hired to do this work, when we were sitting down with a couple of staff members and pulled up the WordPress dashboard and changed something on an early draft of the site. There were audible gasps and one person said, “Oh! Until this moment, I didn’t get that’s what you meant when you said we could make changes ourselves!”

It just goes to show that what’s clear and obvious to a web developer is still remarkable and new to others. It was great to see our clients even more excited than they started.

Are you in Montgomery County, Maryland? Perhaps you can support our clients and a worthy cause by becoming a member of Friends of the Library. We did.