Immigration consultants website - Case Study

Dear All,

I am so happy to announce that with the help of all of you, I was able to complete this website. http://www.oneCsolution.com

The site is complete with the layout and all the required functionality and has been launched.

THIS SITE USES NO CODE, MODULE OR THEME CSS CUSTOMIZATION

Summary
We are providing immigration consultancy services to various clients world-wide. Currently it is all being done MANUALLY or through emails. The process is simple, receive CV's, get initial assessment, inform clients about updates, ask them to make fee payments at various stages and commission.

First of all, we were short on budget, have very limited or almost no technical team on board except myself with LITTLE BIT know how of DRUPAL.

We wanted to increase our client base and to do this we required a content management system to provide necessary information & services with ease of a click.

Since I was convinced about Drupal and its expandability through my research and some other incomplete site (Blog/Forum related). We need to customize a comprehensive and simple to use Drupal site:

The requirements were as follows:

1. People contact us and we tell them to visit our site to get detailed information on services that we provide
2. People visit our site and browse through the information & immigration categories that we are offering services for
3. People decide what category they would want to apply for and click on "Fast Track Me" to register
4. They will be presented with a CV submit / upload form
5. After creating CV profile and uploading their CV file they would receive an email that we are reviewing their submission and will get back in a week period.
6. Our team get notified for submissions, they review consult or do the necessary to evaluate their CVs
7. User get notified when we activate his account (as qualified for processing)
8. User login and see status on case process

Theme

• With my little past experience working with contributed themes, some of them look weird on older browsers. The biggest challenge was to find a theme that can be easily customized as per the needs and highly cross browser compatible
• Marinnelli came out perfect with almost what we were looking for with slight changes

Modules

• The most tedious task was to identify the modules to simplify the development (although i had to do it 3 time altogether from scratch due to various hurdles and learning curve challenges). The following key modules did all the above jobs
• Book module - for easy browsing through immigration categories
• Advance book block - for JQuery navigation of book
• Messaging and Notification modules - for out of the box site messaging and notifications
• PHPMailer - more customizable and robust mailer
• Administration menu - for easy admin functions
• CCK - Filefied mainly
• Content Profile - Came out to be the most important module in our development
• Automatic node titles - To hide Title field on the registration form and fill it using the user name (Many thanks to stevepurkiss for his step-by-step guide on file-upload during user registration )
• Email registration - to simplify registration further and let users register with a file upload and email address only
• CAPTCHA - to avoid any spam registrations
• Content Access - To control profile view settings by users only
• WYSIWYG Editors - TinyMCE - Its never easy to use any of these text editors, but does save some time editing many pages/nodes
• Invite - for users to invite others
• External links - to open all outside links in a new window / tab
• FAQ & FAQ_ASK modules - to create a comprehensive Frequently asked section based on user questions
• Googtube - to simplify embedding videos by just pasting links Coolest module ever
• Poormanscron - I don't know how to configure the server to do the cron jobs, this module simplifies the task
• String Overrides - another cool module that lets you change anything that appear on user screen without changing anything in the Core or .tpl or .CSS
• Google Analytics - to track website usage statistics with Google Analytic tools
• And offcourse VIEWS - to customize display of content to the user

There are still few things that are stuck in my mind like if a user click on Create Account before Clicking on Upload, the form doesn't validate, but it is working fine so far with only few registrations without upload files.

Please visit oneCsolution and feel free to provide your critics or feedback, thanks.

Thanks and best regards
Danish