
Part of my consulting work with the Asia and the Pacfic regional office of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs was to help to improve their website usability and functionality. Since the basic OCHA website architecture was based on the DotNetNuke content management system, updating the website with the amount of map products the office produced was a time consuming task. In addition, the website only had static information which needed to be changed manually frequently. The idea to improve the website was to make it more dynamic. I developed a MS Access database to keep track of maps produced by the office, including where they were located online, the date, title, etc.. This database also had a function to export the information into an XML file which the office could then replace in their server, which then updated the content on the site without manually inputting the information. I also helped to develop an RSS feed for the news section of the site, bringing in information from IRIN News.