Client Description
Established in Research Triangle Park, NC in 1990, the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS) is an American institute that researches statistical science and quantitative analysis. The nonprofit’s principal activities include research projects in areas such as bioinformatics, data confidentiality, data integration, data quality, education statistics, healthcare, transportation, and complex surveys.
The Challenge
DesignHammer designed and developed a new website for NISS in August of 2009 built on Drupal 6. The new content management system allowed individuals at the organization to more easily modify content on their website without the assistance of a website developer. At the time, Drupal 6 was in the early stages of its release cycle. Seven years later, Drupal 6 had reached its end of life. During that time, the website had served NISS very well. However, with official support for the platform being discontinued, it was time to migrate the existing data to Drupal 7 and redesign the theme for a more modern look and feel.
The goal of this website redesign was to put NISS.org on a secure, supported system and to help build their business and customer base by acquiring new clients (academia, industry, and government), cultivating relationships with affiliates and postdocs, and giving their current staff the tools needed to facilitate the above.
The Solution
DesignHammer developed a new Drupal 7 website for NISS, built on supported technology which will function well for years to come. This also allows DesignHammer to continue adding new functionality and improving existing features over time. The existing data from Drupal 6 was migrated over to Drupal 7 using the Migrate module's ability to map old content types and fields to new Drupal 7 content types and fields.
The Results
DesignHammer delivered NISS a new Drupal 7 website with a modernized display, as well as many additional features and functionality upgrades. One main benefit of their new content management system was that it allowed individuals at the organization to easily modify content on their website without the assistance of a website developer.
