The Sandhill Nature Education website is really two sites in one. There is the homepage for a freelance environmental educator, with information about her programs and resources for learning more about the local environment. And then there is an application for classrooms and individuals to track natural events.
Phenology is “a branch of science dealing with the relations between climate and periodic biological phenomena (such as bird migration or plant flowering).” It is interesting and educational to know how the progression of seasons changes from year to year, but it has become increasingly more important in recent years, as it gives naturalists one measure of the effects of climate change. The Pheno–log application is designed to let anyone in Northern Michigan look up an event—such as the first Bluebird of the year, or the first Daffodil to bloom—and immediately see on what day that event happened last year, the earliest date it was recorded on, and record their own sightings.
Since the audience for the Pheno–log webpage includes children and people who may have limited computer experience, it was important that it be easy to use. Almost everything can be done from the main page, with pop–up windows for the detailed information about each event.
I built a custom backend from scratch to manage the data and allow all the text to be edited through the online control panel. One particularly notable feature is a separate style for printing full page lists for teachers to post in the classroom or naturalists to take into the field. We envision additional data reporting features in coming seasons, once we have more data to work with.
I worked on the identity, CMS setup, application programming, information architecture, template design, XHTML/CSS.