convergence.journalism.missouri.educonvergence.journalism.missouri.edu/.../WillConnect-Fina…  · Web viewCommunity Section - For those who are interested in helping to spread the

6.

Organization: Brite Revolution

Website: Briterevolution.com

Located: Nashville, TN

Mission Statement (from site): Brite Revolution is a music discovery platform that connects artists and fans across multiple touch points: digital, print and mobile. But, dig a little deeper and it’s not hard to find our greater purpose – building community around the core principle of music discovery. We accomplish this by fostering community in a socially conscious environment and providing an expressive platform for artists to grow awareness for their work.

Chosen because: General design choices; organization of information; artist search function

When looking at Brite Revolution, the site user’s attention is immediately captured by a large banner, featuring the most important stories from the latest issue. This bold use of space is both eye catching and helpful in assisting the user focus on specific pieces of information. It showcases their photography, and playfully utilizes color to highlight the news that the reader would find most useful on that image.

Additionally, the rest of the main page clearly organizes the content that site users would want the most - live music sessions, album reviews, articles and photo collections - in an easy grid pattern.

The most useful, and innovative, site feature that Brite Revolution has - in my opinion - would be their artist search system. Using a filter system, users are able to select genres, sort and exclude artists within a single window. This system allows the visitor to find the artist they are looking for as well as musically similar artist in a

very interesting way.

7.

Organization: Sower of Seeds

Website: http :// sowerofseeds . org

Location: Keller, TX

Mission Statement (from site): S.O.S. International facilitates and operates compassion outreaches to India, with a focus on social development. We are committed to searching for and developing not only sustainable life-saving solutions, but also truly life-changing ones to the problems the poor face every day. It is our heart to encourage and empower the local church to be a solution in their community.

Our Mission: Responding to cries for help.

Our Vision: Sowing seeds of God's love, compassion and salvation into the helpless, the poor and the needy children of the nations.

Dwayne & Leslie Weehunt saw the need in India for someone to respond to the needs of the poor. Since they founded S.O.S. International in 2001, we have been partnering with others to answer the cries for help, sowing seeds of God’s love, compassion, & salvation into the helpless, poor, and needy children of the nations.

Our goal is to be a bridge, connecting you to world missions in a way that is measurable and full of impact, making an eternal difference in the lives of others.

Chosen Because: Design choices and incorporation of social media.

By using a black-and-white montage of photos with the selective use of bold magenta and red on links and the navigation, the user’s eyes automatically go to the information that the web designer has deemed the more important - how to get from one page to another, the top stories from the past month and links to additional information.

Also, the grid design allows very good placement for Sower of Seed’s social media messages. Underneath the main banner, which displays five featured stories, they have a row, spanning the width of the column, which rotates their latest tweets like a ticker. After that break in the pages aesthetic, the page continues downward with additional information on other projects, a calendar of events and ways to get involved.

Additionally, under their “Community” section of the site, Sower of Seeds provides a very easy way to get touch with their organization on various social media platforms.

Johan Etsebeth

Sower of Seeds, Director of Communications (content manager)

What inspired your website design?

We were looking for something different, something updated, something that better reflected the vision and identity of our organization as well as communicate our mission well and allow us to better tell our story and the stories of the people we are helping in India. The main purpose was to have a web presence that fosters confidence and encourages participation from potential donors.

What was your goal for the design?

To be simple in structure, to capitalize on our strengths. (Photography, Video, showing our Impact on the ground)

What did you want to accomplish with your website?

To communicate our vision and mission clearly, to provide a venue where people can come to find information about our projects and donate online.  We wanted a tool that would present a professional image of our organization that would foster confidence and ultimately elicit support for our work on the ground in India.  

Easy, versatile CMS.

Good integration with online giving, database management tools, accounting, email service provider.

Could you describe the layout and reasoning you had for some of your design choices?

We wanted something that is simple and intuitive. ChurchMedia came up with this format and we were very happy with it.The top section establishes our brand, sets the backdrop for all activities on the site, communicating through images what we are all about and houses our donate button that remains in the same position throughout the user experience. We wanted to have a link to our financial accountability report just below it.

The Navigation Ribbon is the business end of the site - Get information here... If you have come to our site with a need for specific information, this is where you're likely to find it.

Rotator - Give us an ability to prioritize interaction with our site through graphics, linking to deeper layers of the site that might be hard to get to. Room for ads.

Project Thumbnails - Gateway to our various outreaches.

Latest News Section - Integrating our organization's Wordpress site. Creating dynamic content. 

Community Section - For those who are interested in helping to spread the word.

Do you feel the site adequately fits your organization’s needs?

YES

Is there anything that you would improve on the site?

Remove the Myspace Logo. (Laughs)

We love it. If we had a Social Media Department or team, we would be better able to make use of the Community Section.

Better built-in SEO or guidance on optimization and SEO strategy.

In retrospect, is there a design feature you wish you had included the site?

No.

What kind of CMS do you use to keep the site up to date?

Proprietary CHURCHMEDIA CMS. Wordpress for the Blog.

How much maintenance does your site require? Are there some problems that occur more than others?

Burden of creating content is heavy for the Blog and Social Media Section at this point for our organization's size. We manage the project pages well and create new pages as needed, but to truly use the site well, we would have to invest in social media person, researcher, blogger etc. who can post information constantly and network our site on twitter, Facebook etc. I do not feel that we are making the most of our capabilities. We are making the most of our capacity though.

How many versions of the site were there before you decided on this design? What were some of the flaws of the older versions?

This was it. We immediately liked it.

How big is the team responsible for the site’s upkeep? Do you feel this is an adequate staff size?

As director of Communications, I maintain the site as part of my duties, but I find myself devoting a small percentage of my daily workload to it. I get help from our full time Graphic Designer (Designing new Rotators and branding to do graphics. We invite others to contribute to the blog. Some others help with the social media side of things as they feel inspired. We have not been able to prove ROI in order to justify a full time webmaster/creative/social media person. As director I bear the responsibility/  

We also have another web site that represents our local outreach arm and that is run by another person 9 full time -www.volunteerhope.org as well as www.championsforindia.org which does not require much upkeep (same story - we could use more dynamic content, but the number of visitors does not justify the investment of time that would require.) Also seewww.777water.org - a microsite that focuses on providing water for people in India for recurring donations of $7.77.

Although Sower of Seeds is not incredibly active on social media, there is a lot of potential for organizations that do incorporate social media to use a similar design to highlight their other endeavors.

8.

Organization: The Rapidian

Website: therapidian . org / nonprofits

Location: Grand Rapids, MI

Mission Statement (from site): The Rapidian is a citizen journalism project intended to increase the flow of local news and information in the Grand Rapids community and its neighborhoods.

By providing tools, training, platforms and support, we hope to empower neighborhood residents to report the news from the inside out. We are an outlet for Grand Rapidians to become more than just content consumers but also providers by becoming citizen journalists.

We graduated from beta phase on our first birthday but still appreciate any feedback from visitors to make the site experience better.

The Rapidian launched on Sept. 15, 2009 and is a project of the Grand Rapids Community Media Center with funding and support from the Grand Rapids Community Foundation , Slemons Foundation and John S . and James L . Knight

Foundation.

Chosen because: Non-Profit Organizations section

The Rapidian’s non-profit section features original coverage of nonprofit-sponsored events submitted by the organizations themselves. These stories are tagged and sorted by organization and type of event, and displayed in a simple row format in which every post has an accompanying picture.

All posts are self-published by the nonprofit organizations, who register with the site The registration includes standard information (username, password, etc.) in addition to organizational information n (including that organization’s goals and mission statement, a main contact, phone number, location, etc.).

The individual profiles then list all the information provided in addition to links to all stories that organization has posted.

When on an individual post, organization information is linked in the main article, footer and all sidebars. There are also social media plug-ins to Facebook, Flickr and Twitter, as well as an option to subscribe articles from that nonprofit organization to the reader’s RSS feed. In a series of sidebars, information is then categorized by

the areas of the community that the event is focused toward, the event or headquarters of the posting-organizations. Additional images are also provided.

Overall the design is very clean, open and friendly. Upon first glance, it’s very easy to navigate and all instructions for nonprofit organizations are clearly presented. The light yet

consistent use of color keep the pages and posts visually engaging without overwhelming the senses.

George Weitor, designerThe Rapidian

What inspired your website design? What was your goal for the design? What did you want to accomplish with your website? Could you describe the layout and reasoning you had for some of your design choices?

Those all seem like essentially the same question to me. Well, they all go hand and hand, at least, and are the biggest and hardest thing to answer. Overall The Rapidian was an attempt not to overdesign. We are trying to get as much content on screen, with as little (or as minute) design elements as possible with the hopes that it will result in clarity. I have always been a fan of clean and simple design, and this was an attempt to bring that to journalism. Most news sites seem to explode off the screen at you, which makes it difficult to focus on what is really important on the site - the content. Our biggest hope is to keep primary focus on the work of our reporters.

It's a total struggle though, news sites are busy. There is no way around it, and the more stuff we think of, the busier it gets. So there is a constant argument about how to scale up while staying simple.

Do you feel the site adequately fits your organization’s needs?

More or less. There is a lot that I feel is unfinished. lots of things I need to get back to. It's sufficient, but incomplete, from a design perspective.  at least for me. it's mostly nit-picky things.

Is there anything that you would improve on the site? And, in retrospect, is there a design feature you wish you had included the site?

I would like to tighten up the things I eluded to in question 5. If I had my way, I would redo everything with a greater emphasis on typography. There a few things

that didn't quite make it from the original mockups, but they probably weren't great that anways

Did you use a CSS-modified template or build the site from scratch? What coding language did you use and why?

We built this template more or less from scratch, using the Zen base theme in Drupal 6.

What kind of CMS do you use to keep the site up to date?

Drupal 6, though we are exploring an upgrade to Drupal 7.

How did you test the site’s usability?

When we started the Rapidian we had several community meetings where we asked for input on desired / hated web elements for news sites. We then made our best attempt to implement those results and then followed that up with some fairly informal user tests. We have an ongoing request for user input, and many small changes have been made based on user complaint and suggestions.

How much maintenance does your site require? Are there some problems that occur more than others?

This is a good question. Our primary Drupal developer does about an hour or two of regular weekly maintenance, with occasional time set aside for bigger things. For example, he spent a few hours today cleaning out old things that we had previously developed but no longer use. It's not a lot of maintenance, but it is regular.

How many versions of the site were there before you decided on this design? What were some of the flaws of the older versions?

This is more or less the second version of The Rapidian and it is response to the inflexible nature of the previous version. Before there were separate "buckets" for each of the primary ways that we categorized content: news, local life, opinion, and nonprofit. This required us to have at least 4  of each kind of article every day for the

site to not look static and dead. It didn't reflect the actual flow of news, where we could get 7 local life articles in a day, but only one opinion piece all week. Being stuck with the one opinion piece on the front page made the site feel more  static than it truly was. This new version was primarily get rid of the specific content regions so that we could better for feature content on the front page regardless of what kind it was. We also modified the article pages to put an emphasis on multimedia content. nope

How big is the team responsible for the site’s upkeep? Do you feel this is an adequate staff size?

If you mean technically speaking? 1.2. One primary developer who works on the site about 8 hours per week, and me, a dilettante, who is responsible for the design elements and the overall development planning and strategy. It has been sufficient so far - but a larger team would be great when working on a lot of larger projects all at once, of course. Overall, it has been fine.

Nonprofits.

Why choose a self-publishing system?

How does the self-publishing system work exactly?

How much oversight does that section receive?

What lead to the final design of that section - the inclusion of links, the placement of information, design elements?

The nonprofit section was originally a lot more complicated than it is now. There was an originally essentially a clone of the front page for nonprofits. But it was difficult to maintain a second front page, editorially, and we found that most people interacted with the content from the traditional front page anyhow. So, we have radically simplified the nonprofits section to the point where it is basically like any other content listing page: all of the relevant content in reverse chronological order. We haven't gotten a single complaint about this decision and it makes our work life much easier.

9.

Organization: Creative Arts Initiative

Website: creativeartsinitiative.org

Location: Nashville, TN

Mission Statement (from site): The Creative Arts Initiative is a intentionally small non-profit philanthropic organization that seeks to educate artists who are Christians in how to pursue their vocational calling, helping them preserve and create excellent art that faithfully and effectively communicates a broad picture of Christianity and how it relates to all of life. This mission is accomplished through an individual, holistic, hands-on process of artist education, career assessment, and strategic planning that seeks to bring about spiritual development, sustainable business practice, and creative expression.

Chosen Because: use of color, organization of information

This web design utilizes bold colors to create a visual hierarchy for the user, directing the eye primarily across the navigation bar, then down the News Feed - which hold the most important information on the ho

Each page uses the same template for information, which reduces user confusion as a person navigates from page to page. Also, through a very intuitive and colorful navigation bar, the user always knows exactly where they are at all times.

The primary organizer of information on CAI is a flash-designed box that allows users to select the particular content they would like to access, which displays that content in another section without having to reload the page. This is a really convenient way to store and display information and extremely easy to use.

10.

Organization: Dishizzle

Website: dishizzle.com

Location: San Diego, CA

Mission Statement (from site): Our mission is to simplify and innovate people's dining experience.

Chosen Because: User generated content and a bold interface

Although this is the least “journalistic” of the sites chosen, Dishizzle is has a very innovative way of gathering their information and a bold way of displaying that information. A place for foodies to gather and find new places to find the food their craving, Dishizzle uses a colorful and warm interface, playful font style choices to reflect the nature of the site.

Clearly displayed are the images, prices and restaurants where the food item in question came from. Along with a side bar displaying the top reviewed meals and restaurants on the side.

They display clear, yet quirky navigation both on the top and bottom of each page, making moving around the site incredibly easy.