Web Design: 2020 Vision Conference



The 2020 Vision Conference website is intended to provide basic information about the conference, provide access to documents generated, and host forum discussions as follow-up events. The website provides access to the participant names and even a Twitter Hash, as an experiment in pulling in social media comments back to the website.



I began to design process of the site by discussing with John and Lynn what the goals for the website would be. One goal was engagement with people from the field. Now, engagement is an active process in which someone needs to regularly communicate with people. The website cannot do it on its own. However, we did not want features, or the lack of features, to get in the way of future engagement activities. The second criteria (rather than goal) was that it was not a burden to maintain or to use.

I quickly sketched a mockup using Balsamiq. See it here. I really wanted to host this site using the Drupal site that Cosine had set up for me. However, I found Drupal to be too unstable and design adjustments either required access to templates or new modules that I couldn't upload. Even on my development site, I couldn't get the website running. I switched over to blogs.oregonstate.edu, this is a multi-user version of Wordpress run by the university. I knew that this would be limiting, even more than Drupal, but I needed to get something up in a week. I played around with the themes, and found one and make it look the way I wanted it to look.

I started filling in content of the website. The About, People, Docs, then Blog itself. I planned to stop there. I referred back to my mockup, and I had built out 4 of 6 pieces already and finished off the design. It was simple to add the Contact page. I googled "embedded forum" and found Nabble. It let you set up a generic online forum that users don't need to register for. Now, the OSU Wordpress doesn't allow embed code, other than a few video websites. So I added the link. I did however, subscribe to the RSS feeds from the forum with the sidebar widget. That way any new content will be pushed back to the website. I spent time on Animoto building a slideshow, but in the end the free options are too limiting. I'm still looking for a good free, web slideshow maker and host.

Tools
  • Balsamiq
  • Etherpad
  • Nabble
  • Twitter
  • Animoto

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