Our Nurse Practitioner Preceptor Development Program Site is Live!

​After six months of development, I’m proud to say that the website for our HRSA grant, NP-PD-PDP, is live! Go to pdp.nursing.nyu.edu to check it out.  Here's a quick summary of the work involved in creating the site:

First, the Principal Investigator (PI) and I worked together to figure out what content to put up. We needed pages that explain the goals of the grant, provide resources, and link to our e-learning courses. After bringing our list of pages and a brief summary of the content, the development team asked me to create some page mock-ups that show how each page would look and feel.

Process

The PI had very specific requirements about how each page would look and I was tasked with creating a visualization of her ideas via these mock-ups. For example, she wanted images to scroll across the top of the homepage with some words over each image.  I had never designed a mock-up before, but with Adobe Experience Design (XD) and Photoshop, it was pretty quick and painless. My Adobe Creative Cloud subscription comes with  Adobe XD, which I used to found to be user-friendly enough for an amateur such as myself. Check out these examples below:

Homepage mock-up designed in Adobe XD

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Education page mock-up designed in Adobe XD. On this page, learners can quickly access e-learning modules and other educational resources.

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About Us page mock-up designed in Adobe Photoshop

Collaboration

I was very fortunate to be able to work with our web development team. They were extremely accommodating and did most of the heavy lifting. After exchanging a few mock-up drafts, they created the custom aesthetic that we aimed for. Here are some screen shots of the live site below (see how they compare to the mock-ups):

Screenshot of the Home Page

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Screenshot of the Education page. Only one module is up, but there are more to come!

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Screenshot of the About Us page. We decided to add faculty and staff bios to this page. Photographs to be uploaded soon.

Adding Content

Finally, the development team gave me a tutorial on how I could upload content to the site on my own. I especially lucked out big time since they created their very own Drupal-based site template (kind of like Wordpress) customized to look and function as we needed it to (did I mention how fortunate I was to work with them?).  Thanks to them, uploading and editing content was pretty easy. I had asked the PI to send me the text content of each page and then all I had to do was copy and paste it into the blank fields of each page while in “edit” mode. 

Overall, I'm very pleased with how the site is turning out. There's still a lot to be added, such as modules and other educational resources, but I'm glad to have something I can direct people to that shows some of the work I've been doing for the grant. Shout out to the development team at NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing for helping to make it a reality! 

2018 Update!

Above, I mentioned that we needed to add modules to the page. As of Spring 2018, I migrated all modules from our learning management system, Adobe Captivate Prime, to the grant website. I will go into the details behind this decision in another post, but here's the short explanation: hosting the modules on our site allows for sustainability and ease of access that the LMS does not provide in the long-term. I look forward to exploring more ways in which the website can be used as a repository for learning resources related to grant objectives.