The Ohio Education Association (OEA) is a non-profit organization established in 1847. The OEA represents more than 120,000 teachers, faculty members and support professionals who work in Ohio’s schools, colleges, and universities to help improve public education and the lives of Ohio’s children. The OEA members provide a wide range of professional education services in communities throughout the state. The OEA is an affiliate of the National Education Association and the largest labor union in the state of Ohio.

The OEA had been a customer of 14 Oranges since 2017 with the launch of their mobile app using our Info Grove platform and approached 14 Oranges looking to improve their website. The website had been stagnant for the last 4 years and they had a lot of complaints from members, such as:

• “It was hard to find stuff”
• “Search function wasn’t useful, better to use Google search”
• “The site navigation was cumbersome”

Furthermore, the content wasn’t properly organized and the site performed poorly with SEO.

Design and Development Strategy

As per our standard development services, 14 Oranges worked with the key stakeholders at the OEA throughout the entire development process. The strategy of our design and development process is based on an engineering mindset and has been perfected over many years deploying solutions to our organizations large and small. The development process for the OEA was the following:

1. Research and Requirements Analysis Phase.
2. Wireframes & Design Phase.
3. Implementation Phase.
4. Quality Assurance Phase.
5. Acceptance Phase.
6. Deployment Phase.
7. Training Phase.
8. Ongoing Support Phase.

Research and Requirements Analysis Phase

As part of this phase, 14 Oranges interviewed OEA staff and prepared a list of functional requirements in priority order as well as a list of personas or the target audience(s) for the website.

If your focus is on encouraging communication among your users, allowing them to communicate with others and key staff members when they need support, Info Grove offers a helpful module that can be added to your app.

Wireframes Phase

Once the Research and Requirements Analysis phase was completed, our UI/UX specialist utilized the outputs of the research phase and drafted a set of wireframes and updated sitemap in order to improve the usability of the website while meeting the requirements and personas discovered in the research and requirements analysis phase. The wireframes focused on the usability of the website although still included design/look and feel (colors, fonts, icons, and graphics) elements. As mobile user site visits are more common now than ever, support for mobile devices was at the forefront to ensure the greatest usability and to allow members and the public easier access to the services and information provided on the site. The wireframes were presented to the OEA staff for review and approval.

Implementation Phase

Once the wireframes were approved, 14 Oranges began the implementation phase of the project in an Agile Methodology like approach. The project was broken down into weekly milestones where tasks were completed in priority order as defined during the research and requirements phase. At the end of each milestone, a demo of the site was presented to the OEA for review and comments to ensure that the website was still tracking to the initial requirements. Furthermore, the tasks for the next milestones were adjusted and assigned allowing flexibility in the implementation of the website. Throughout the development lifecycle, the code was maintained under revision control (GIT) to ensure that all changes were tracked allowing the ability to revert back to previous versions should the need arise.

Throughout this phase, the OEA was required to provide the necessary page content required for each milestone. At the beginning of the implementation phase, a content plan was created to identify content that was required for each phase so that the OEA staff could remain slightly ahead of the schedule. Content was provided by the OEA using the Trello Project Management tool. For content that was migrated from the existing website as is, the 14 Oranges team migrated the content from the current website on behalf of the OEA.

Implementation of the website was completed within a development environment where search engine crawlers (bots) had been disabled preventing the site from being indexed by popular search engines (Google, Bing, so on). Throughout the life of the project, access to the development environment was provided to OEA staff allowing them to monitor the status of the website at their leisure.

CMS Platform

For this project, 14 Oranges used WordPress. WordPress has been our go-to platform for the majority of the website projects completed over the last 15 years. WordPress is widely deployed and well supported. It also comes with a multitude of plugins (free and paid) allowing to expand its capabilities or enabling easy integrations with a variety of 3rd party systems like CRM systems, marketing email automation tools, analytics tools, and so on. Furthermore, since it is open, it is very easy to extend its capabilities should the need arise and a plugin not be available.

The website is supported on the following platforms:

• Microsoft Edge – Last 2 stable releases.
• Firefox – Last 2 stable releases.
• Chrome – Last 2 stable releases.
• Safari (on Mac) – Last 2 stable releases.

On the following operating systems:

• Windows 10 and 11
• Mac OS Mojave, Catalina, Big Sur, Monterey, Ventura, Sonoma, and Sequoia
• IOS 16.x, 17.x., and 18.x
• Android 10.x, 11.x, 12.x, 13.x, 14.x, and 15.x

Quality Assurance Phase

14 Oranges completed the project with a round of quality assurance testing with its experienced team of testers to ensure the site is functioning properly on all supported browsers and operating systems. Any issues discovered by the 14 Oranges QA team or the OEA team were logged into internal bug tracking tool Fogbugz.

Acceptance Phase

Although access to the development environment was provided throughout the project, 14 Oranges requested the OEA staff to perform a final review of the site for acceptance for deployment.

Deployment Phase

Upon receiving final approval from the OEA, 14 Oranges deployed the website on the OEA selected production environment for public access. 

Training Phase

Once the site was launched, 14 Oranges held training sessions with key OEA staff on how to add content to the site and perform basic tasks such as adding new blog posts, new pages, and other typical website operations. 

Ongoing Support Phase

Since the site has been launched (Fall 2024), 14 Oranges has continued to support the OEA staff with their questions and helped with additional changes required on the site.

Final Results

The website (https://ohea.org/) has been well received by members of the OEA. Members are also very happy with the new layout and like the new design and icons. Members are now more easily able to find what they need from the website reducing the numbers of emails/calls. 

The OEA staff felt the project went really well and the 14 Oranges hit their launch timelines.

“The team at 14 Oranges has been excellent to work with and has been really responsive to our requests”
Valencia Turner, Director of Communications & Marketing, OEA

The team at 14 Oranges was really excited to work on this website development project and loved that they were able to solve the problems identified by the OEA.

If your organization is looking to improve its website with a complete overhaul like with the OEA or a simple uplift, the team at 14 Oranges is here to help.