Citizen Action IL Annual Dinner

Attended the annual Citizen Action IL Dinner. Jesse Jackson Sr. was the honoree.

Citizen Action/IL Annual Dinner

The good people at Citizen Action/IL had their Annual Dinner at the Chicago Hilton yesterday. Congressman Phil Hare received the Lerner-Egan Award. On the dais, from left to right: IL. Senate President John Cullerton, CFL President Jorge Ramirez, Citizen Action-IL Co-Director Lynda DeLaforgue, IL Governor Pat Quinn, Congressman Phil Hare, Citizen Action-IL Co-Director William McNary and Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (partially hidden).

New Website: CitizenAction-IL.org

Here's something I launched in between bites of turkey over the weekend: http://www.CitizenAction-IL.org

It's for a great statewide organization that's very active in health care reform among other things.

Basically I took what they already had -- essentially a site consisting of links and pdf files -- and completely automated the thing so that in-house staff can add content themselves rather than sending it out to a web specialist.

The thing's running on Drupal with Panels for the front page. My focus was on automating as much of the site as possible including all the navigation and menus -- so that again, in-house staff could manage these things.

I went with WYSIWYG for the first time for content creation, including IMCE for managing stock photos and of course, ImageCache for pretty much everything else. Since the in-house staff was more comfortable with MS Word, going this way made sense.

Style-wise, I pretty much worked off the design of the previous site. This allowed me, again, to focus on the automation side, while leaving the option, further down the road, of coming up with something a bit more snazzy.

For the moment, it's totally serviceable and meets the needs of the organization. And that's what ultimately counts.

Citizen Action Illinois - Annual Dinner

Citizen Action-Illinois had its Annual Dinner yesterday evening. The emphasis, not surprisingly, was on health care reform. The situation for hotel workers also got attention.

Award-winner this year was Gov. Pat Quinn who arrived late due to his attendance at a service in the suburbs honoring an Illinois veteran killed in Afghanistan.