Around Spring of 2016 it was clear that if DGM was to keep growing, the website would need to migrate from a ‘hard coded’ approach to a  flexible and user-friendly content management system.  With the help of local web developer David Salazar, the content, style, and feel of the site that the UMSI students had built was migrated to a WordPress platform.  The migration to WordPress especially by way of the Divi theme has dramatically facilitated the ability to create, modify, and display content on our website.

The DGM team has long looked for inspiration in other organizations, locally and otherwise, that have their own unique way of structuring and displaying data, especially maps.  In the spirit of sharing resources and facilitating discussion, the team proposed the idea of gathering local mapmakers together to discuss their experiences.  The first ‘Mapmakers Meeting’ was held in January 2016 and featured representatives from Community Development Advocates of Detroit to talk about their d[COM]munity project, as well as Detroit Greenways Coalition who spoke on their bike lane and bike parking map.  DGM held two more meetings in 2016 featuring voices from The Greening of Detroit, Detroit Future Cities, and the City of Detroit’s Open Data Portal.  DGM intends to continue these discussions in 2017.

In the spring of 2015 two teams of students from University of Michigan School of Information helped reimagine and redesign the website. The first team (Service Day 2015) focused on User Interface / User Experience, and spent a day working with the DGM team to perform a heuristic evaluation on the site. The resultant study was used by a cohort of Alternative Spring Break (2015) students over the course of a week to redesign and recreate the website.

The map was originally hosted on a platform called OpenGreenMap, the mapped points and associated metadata available for export to a .csv file. After some research with other platforms including Leaflet, and Google Mapmaker, we came across Derek Eder’s Fusion Table Map files on GitHub. After importing the OpenGreenMap data into a Fusion Table I was able to work with that code to create a searchable map. The map evolved both functionally and visually over time but the platform remains the same. (2013-2014)  During this time, the website and map were built on the Wix platform.