JimHightower.com

After our initial strategic planning engagement with Jim Hightower's organization, we began work on redesigning JimHightower.com, Jim's professional website that carries his daily Common Sense Commentaries, schedule of appearances and his books and audio products.

The site was previously hosted by a proprietary ASP and was difficult for the client to manage. One of the primary goals of the project was to move the site into an easy to administer content management system so that the client's staff can keep the site up to date.

JimHightower.com is running on Drupal 4.7 and utilizes some of the latest Drupal Modules, including the Content Construction Kit (CCK). It was important to the client that we not loose any of the legacy content from the proprietary site. Our engineers worked with database files provided by the legacy vendor to recreate all archived content (over five thousand articles!).

We worked with the client's graphic designer on the information architecture for the site and then developed a distinct theme based on new layout. Rather than continue to use streaming audio technology for the Common Sense Commentaries - 2 minute daily dispatches from Jim Hightower - the client is now posting these audio commentaries as MP3 files. An RSS feed is available for visitors to subscribe to these free daily PodCasts.

In the next phase of this project, we will deploy the Hightower Lowdown Newsletter site and the Blowdown, the Hightower Blog. Content will be reproduced from one site to the other.