ActivateYourLife.org.uk is an online community for Christian Women in the UK. backinthebox were asked to take on the existing concept site and develop a new site for them with added functionality and a new fresh feel making it easier for community members to contribute to the site and to expand the breach of the network.

sailfin|development team took the original site, reviewed a couple of proposed sitemaps and then re-designed the site using their experience and creativity to produce a plan for a content-managed system with the ability to use different sections and content-types to acr as a catalyst for the community members' creativity.

The Sailfin team spoke with the client about how the charity operates and the open structure that the site needed to have to enable many people to get involved. Because of this, Sailfin chose to use the open-source content-management-system (CMS) Drupal. Using an open-source CMS gives Activate the ability to take ownership of the site and to protect their longterm business by not relying on a single proprietary system. As a charity this is a positive step in protecting themselves against unneccessary costs in the future by relying on only one supplier's expertise.

sailfin|development team then developed the www.ActivateYourLife.org.uk site based around three sections of

along with a blog and an FAQs page. The site was populated with articles, thoughts and stories from the charity's management team.

www.ActivateYourLife.org.uk went live at the end of January 2009 and is now operating a well supported community of like-minded women.

Additional functionality was added when plans for the annual conference were announced and a simple payment system was needed. The problem faced was that many of the online event management sites which have been set up to make organising such an event very easy, take too larger commission from each delegate for Activate to manage. Equally the development time and cost needed to integrate and configure Drupal's own eCommerce solution would have taken too much revenue away from the charity.

In the end after evaluating a number of 'off the shelf' payment systems, it was decided that the ease of use of PayPal would be suitable. Setup and configuration took minutes instead of hours and Activate are now able to accept online payments easily and can also accept donations.