Ottawa Insights

The Ottawa Insights project is intended to, in their words, "enable Ottawa citizens to better understand key local issues and trends, empowering them to take informed action to improve the quality of life in our city." It pulls statistics related to social issues in Ottawa and presents them in ways designed to draw connections that may otherwise be missed. It's a fascinating site with broad community interest all the way to city hall.

We had three roles in the development of the site. First, we architected the data structure to contain the massive amount of text and graphical information. This involved extensive customizations to the WordPress admin interface as well as training on how it all worked when delivered. The second was to code the designs provide by the graphic design team into a custom theme and custom plugin in both official languages. Third, we managed the site launch and continue to manage its health.

We are most proud of the "Build-a-Theme" page, which is used to identify trends by grouping tagged sets of statistics into a single page for review. It's pretty neat.

Mike’s expertise and knowledge allows him to always be at least 3 or 4 steps ahead of the game. It is this proactive mentality that really helped guide decision making when creating our site. He is always looking for ways to make the site easier for us to manage in the future.

With such a complex site, we needed a developer who had excellent response times. Mike always responds to any call or email within minutes and his uptime monitoring is second to none. When our site went down due to server issues, he notified us within minutes and immediately got things resolved before any of our staff even noticed that we had an issue in the first place! When our project website was presented to the Mayor, he was there to ensure that we had no technical issues and the presentation of the site went without a hitch. What a gem!

Chayanika Lutes