NE Integrated Pest Management Center

Challenge: The Northeast Integrated Pest Management Center (IPM) had built a large public information website about dealing with crop pests, and had done it in cooperation with other national IPM centers. IPM technology and its distribution are funded by the US Department of Agriculture; plus most states; and other federal programs. There are many sources of information and several audiences for that information ranging from gardeners to farmers to researchers. The IPM centers needed a single website system for information input and dispersal built with distributed input channels for qualified contributors. It needed to be replicable

Solution: After extensive planning with the Northeast group, Spider created a single data structure for the content and website administration with access control, participatory input mechanisms, automated email sending of various notifications, data editors of many types, and an overall interface that allowed staff to continue using Dreamweaver for maintaining the more graphical content of the website. Recognizing web-users’ preference for graphics and the breadth of the audience, the higher-level pages are simply graphical indexes. The application uses the ColdFusionÆ database server and an MS Access DatabaseÆ, runs on the client’s server.

Results: Soon after going live with the Northeast IPM Center’s application the US Department of Agriculture and two universities hosting other regional centers purchased replications of the application to run against the one dataset. Spider ported it twice in MS SQL Server and once in MySql. The websites support more than 30,000 visits per month.

Please be aware that Spider ITX develops websites into which clients may place their own text. We will occasionally own a typo, but most text is placed by others.