Heartland Journey Ecards

Heartland Journey is a program developed to help people regain and maintain cardiovascular fitness. Founded by Dan McKinney, the program takes the form of a 'Walk Across America', giving purpose to the often boring sessions on the treadmill.

Dan wanted to add an eCard feature to his website as an additional way to reinforce a Heart Healthy lifestyle. He had looked around at other PHP ecard systems but finally settled on sendcard. "I found lots of scripts but none seemed to offer a complete solution like sendcard", says Dan.

While Dan knew sendcard could do everything required, he needed some extra features, and asked me (Peter, the author of sendcard) to develop them.

Automatic e-card pages

The first feature was for sendcard's thumbnail page (where visitors select their card) to be automatically generated, so Dan didn't have to spend valuable time recoding the HML page every time he wanted to add a new card. As Dan notes, "I wanted maintenance of the site to be easy as I need to be spending my time marketing Heartland Journey and not coding.".

Once Dan had explained what he needed I created a solution that exactly met his needs. Now all Dan needs to do is upload the images to folders on his website, and everything appears like magic. Dan's pleased: "I wanted the content to be easy to update and Peter's customizations were an ideal solution!".

Password-protected ecards

The second modification was to make sure only members of the 'Walk Across America' program could send cards. "This may seem a hindrance, but I really didn't want any spam sent from our site. I also wanted distinct features for members as a selling point for the program.", says Dan.

Everybody who enrolls on the program is given a Passport number (known as a password in other situations!), and so I developed a plugin for sendcard to prevent cards being sent without the passport number, and an administration area for managing these passwords.

Now, everyone who wants to send a card must enter their Passport number on the screen. Without it - it's impossible to send a card.

And Dan's final word? "The choice to use sendcard is an easy one to make. Yes, the software is excellent but you also get the developer's skills and help as part of the package. The software was basically free so I consider the reasonable fees for Peter to install, integrate and customize to be the best bargain on the WEB. With Peter on your team, you can spend your time being creative and profitably."

To make ecards work for you as they do at Heartland Journey, contact me (Peter) and let me work my magic on your site.

Have you done something special with sendcard? Get your site featured in the case-studies section! Contact Peter with details of your site.