Windsor Essex Community Health Centre (WECHC) | David Jaggs Memorial Library

Client Intro

The Windsor Essex Community Health Centre (WE CHC) was initially formed in 2009, as a result of the amalgamation of the Teen Health and the Sandwich Community Health Centres. The WE CHC operates several locations and various initiatives that are aimed at support the health and wellness of the vulnerable population of Windsor-Essex County.

The Challenge

The Windsor Essex Community Health Centre (WE CHC) operated the David Jaggs Memorial Library as a bricks-and-mortar library of books, journals, periodicals, articles, and audio/visual materials of specific relevance to youth ages 12 to 24. As a bricks-and-mortar location-based service, the David Jaggs Memorial Library operated during limited weekday hours, and therefore, no longer appealed to its youth demographic, which is comprised of tech-savvy users who expect instant, on-demand information that is supported by the latest trends in technology.

To solve the issue of limited operating hours, the WE CHC proposed a online version of the David Jaggs Memorial Library, to provide 24/7 access to pertinent and important information targeted to youth ages 12-24.

The Solution

Through extensive collaboration with the WE CHC project team, Wired Solutions designed and developed the David Jaggs Memorial Library as a responsive and immersive web experience that offers a wide range of digital health-based resources that cater to the youth demographic.

The David Jaggs Memorial Library was developed as a scalable, web-based library to allow public, youth users access to  content approved and made available by WE CHC administrators. To support administrative workflows, we developed a secure administration interface, built on a customized content management system (CMS).

In designing the front-end of the Library, we focused on ease-of-use and logical content structuring, so as to ensure that end-users are able to easily search for, and locate, content of interest.  The application was developed using modern development techniques and responsive design principles, in order to establish a high quality, sleek digital experience that effectively relates to the expectations of the target audience. Key social sharing concepts, such as social media integration, user-generated Favourite’s Lists, and the ability to rate content, all provide an interactive, end-user focused experience.

In developing the back-end of the Library, we developed a user-friend, web-based Administration Area to provide WE CHC administrators with the ability to add, edit, and/or delete Library Resources such as articles, videos, podcasts, presentations, PDFs, etc. A Resource Tagging and Resource Category system was further developed in order to support the back-end creation of Library Resources, as well as the front-end intuitive search functionality.

In the back-end of the Library, WE CHC administrators gain access to customizable fields such as: titles, resource descriptions, tags, categories, and images, for each Library Resource.

Supporting Technologies

A selection of pre-developed proprietary engines as well as the latest programming frameworks, were used to facilitate our custom approach to development. Supporting technologies include:

• Wired Authentication Engine: A proprietary engine based on the Microsoft ASP.NET membership and authentication engine. The engine is a customized provider developed by Wired Solutions to extend the base functionality of .NET in order to facilitate common requirements such as application permission definitions, the logging of user actions for audit purposes, 2 or 3 factor authentication, social media authentication options, remote or single sign-on (SSO) authentication, and more.
• Wired Multilingual Engine: A proprietary engine that efficiently allows authenticated users to set their language preference through their profile, while in instances of unauthenticated users, the engine detects language preferences through browser settings, and then serves the application’s content and data in the proper language.
• Wired Content Management: A proprietary inline edit system that allows content editing in-place through a ‘what you see is what you get’ (WYSIWYG) fashion. This system includes a rich HTML editor that allows users with sufficient permission the ability to format content easily.