The Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation of Harvard Law School (CHLPI) advocates for legal, regulatory, and policy reforms to improve the health of underserved populations.

Two years ago, Sales Renewal worked with CHLPI to build a new WordPress website that was modern-looking, responsive and easy for the CHLPI team to maintain. A key component of the new website was the creation of a Health Library, which houses all of its published research, articles from academic journals, and legal documents like amici briefs and administrative complaints.

As the number of publications in this Library grew over the last two years, CHLPI realized it was getting more and more difficult for readers to find the content most relevant to them. and they identified the need to be able to search by:

1. Keywords
2. Geography
3. Type of document
4. Topic
5. Publication year
6. Combinations of the above

In addition, for the geographic search, they also wanted it to not only be textual (the name of a state) but also visual (clicking the state on a map).

When they approached Sales Renewal for advice, we understood that as a non-profit, they were budget-sensitive, so we looked at available WordPress plugins that would meet these criteria. Unfortunately, while their search requirements could be addressed by separate plugins, there weren’t any that would handle all at once.

Affordable, Custom Search System

Consequently, Sales Renewal created a custom search system for CHLPI’s Health Library Publications that integrated multiple off-the-shelf plugins to meet their requirements at an affordable price:

• A multi-faceted, term-based filtering system, allowing users to narrow their search by Geographic Focus, Document Type, Publication Topic, or Publication year
• A keyword-based search system
• A visual, map-based filter in which will automatically update to indicate which geographic regions have applicable publications

Other notable features include:

• The system requires no additional work on the web editor’s part when adding a publication to the library – all they do is include a specific tag to categorize it correctly
• The entire system runs on asynchronous JavaScript*, so the page doesn’t have to reload when filters or search terms are changed
• Filters are represented as query strings in the website’s URL (for example, http://www.chlpi.org/health_library/?fwp_geographic_focus=south-carolina), which means that specific searches can be bookmarked by users for future reference, or linked to from outside sources, such as other websites, blog posts, or e-mails.
• The system is responsive, and works on desktop computers, tablets, and smartphones.

Feedback on the new Library has been overwhelmingly positive and has been called a “fantastic addition.” We encourage you to visit the CHLPI Health Library and test out the features for yourself. And please contact us for your next custom development project – we’re happy to provide a no-charge consultation.

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* Synchronous code is executed in sequence – each statement in the code waits for the previous statement to finish before executing. Asynchronous code doesn’t wait – your program can continue to run. This helps keep your site or app responsive, and reduces waiting time, making for a better user experience.