Robert Kern

Date: 2005-2008 | Visit site: www.askchris.co.nz

I have been involved with this client from the beginning of their company. It started with a dream by Chris, and led to a highly functional, secure, easy-to-use website.

This site was built from scratch by me. It uses PHP and MySQL.

AskChris is an online counselling service originally developed by me in 2005. The original website was designed to allow users to register for free, and send a question to a counsellor for a fee.

There is an extensive back-end system that gives the company complete control over almost all aspects of their site. Some of the key administration features are below:

• Admin users assign questions to specific counsellors based on the identified issue.
• View very detailed statistics about question answer times (comparing counsellors etc), client stats, averages and more.
• Manage site messages.
• Manage staff members, admin members, and client members, and their access rights.
• Manage commissions.
• Manage payments, refunds, credits etc.
• Manage ‘gift card’ codes.
• Manage articles.
• Manage newsletters.
• … and much more.

That was 2005, and while there have been plenty of updates since then, the most recent major update was the addition of a chat facility which is detailed below:

Chat

This feature was added in late 2007 by myself through The Web Company. The client wanted a specific method of being able to engage in chat sessions between their clients and counsellors. It starts with counsellors setting available time-slots. I developed a very simple system where the counsellors can quickly assign many chat sessions in short time.

Next, their client has a look at the chat timetable which displays all available time slots (they can choose which day to look at). The client picks an available timeslot simply by clicking on it, which brings them through the necessary process to book the timeslot.

On the day of the chat session, the client (and counsellor) will receive a reminder email so they dont forget the session (counsellors can opt to receive an SMS reminder). On the day that the chat session falls, the client is allowed to enter the chat room (for that specific session). They are notified when the counsellor enters the room and the chat session begins. I have implemented an AJAX chat solution that is very quick and light-weight.

The clients (and counsellors) are able to print out a chat transcript after their session ends (at any time after the session ends).

If you have any questions about this project then feel free to ask, but keep in mind that it is a sensitive project because of the information that is involved with their clients, and the fact that this was the first (NZ based) and remains to be the most complex (worldwide) online counselling service around – so there are some secrets!