Shop with a Cop and Firefighter, from prototype to working system.

A holiday program in Jonesborough came to me with a careful plan that ran in one browser. Making it real, secure and live was what I was hired to do.

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The live site

The prototype, before

Fig. 1 · The live landing page beside the prototype I built it from.

01 The problem

The plan was good. There was just nothing under it yet.

Each December, police officers and firefighters in Jonesborough take local kids shopping. The program already had a detailed prototype covering every form, field and rule, the household numbering, the shopping sheets and the printable forms. It also ran in a single browser, with no shared database, no staff logins and no email. So the prototype stated the plan, and everything it would take to run that plan for real families was the job I was hired for.

02 What I did

Scoped season one

I cut the first season down to the jobs that take the most staff time. Event day stays on paper this season. The dashboard, check-in, wristbands and per-child bag tags are planned for a later one.
Kept the prototype as the blueprint

I didn't start over. I built the working system underneath the plan the program had already made.
Built the public forms

Child registration, sponsor sign-up and volunteer sign-up, built to WCAG 2.1 AA, working on phones, with spam protection on each one.

Fig. 2 · The child registration form on a phone.
Built the staff side

Staff sign in with a single-use link sent by email, with no passwords. A review inbox lets them approve or deny with recorded reasons and assign the event at approval. Household numbers assign themselves, and the roster keeps a full change history.

Fig. 3 · The review inbox, with made-up test families.

Fig. 4 · A test record and its change history.
Left the sending to staff

I built sponsor assignment and shopping sheets. Each sponsor gets one email with every sheet attached, and sheets print for children the program shops for. Email goes out only when staff choose to send it. I also built a printable forms library and spreadsheet exports.

Fig. 5 · Shopping sheets grouped by sponsor, with test data.
Protected the records and launched

Family records delete automatically 90 days after the season's last event. I gave staff a separate review copy so they could test everything without touching real families, then took the real system live.