Good stuff guys. What's status? Let me know where I can supply additional feedback or ideas.

I agree with Neal that a separate website for internal IAA matters would be complicated. I suspect that over time, one website or the other (almost certainly the internal website) would be forgotten. I think we should focus on creating its own non-scary, out-of-your-face corner of the new site.

Regarding Regional Clubs - that's a project I recently agreed to head. We're currently in the process of contacting old chairs, identifying new chairs, and planning elections (some of which will coincide with the events with Max). We will also eventually be discussing rewrites to the constitution that will make the clubs viable over the long haul.

My first, quick impression from viewing Tarun's mock site is very positive. I like the idea of the critical information that's useful to most alumni (getting connected, events, announcements, etc...) being the focus of the site. The layout appears professional and functional. I like the idea of cabinet-related items being on a parallel site as most people aren't concerned with meeting minutes or discussion threads about IAA cabinet topics. Thanks for putting this first round draft/proposal together!

Okay, so I threw something together today since work was so slow.

http://imsa.nagpal.info

This is a totally non-functional mock-up which I am happy to explain the reasoning behind.

Essentially I thought that the major things people care about from a normal alumni perspective are:

1. Where are my friends?
2. When is the next event?

So I put those front and "above the fold". I optimistically branded it IMSAlum to match the newspaper, but we could change it to IMSAAlumni.org which would match the URL we have.

I would suggest moving Cabinet stuff over to IAA.org as a parallel site. Most people aren't really going to care about the minutes, and those who do can go over there (I could put a relevant link under the About page).

Get Connected would have links to more detailed alumni searches, links to the various social network groups (facebook/linkedin) and other similar type of linking activity. Also perhaps a proper forum/discussion board, although it might require moderation which is an issue.

We could add RSS and iCalendar links for the Events and Announcements sections.

Regional Clubs would list contact people for each, have a list of events specific to that club (keywords should suffice to parse those), and other relevant info including maybe jobs that need to be done.

Donate to IMSA is pretty obvious I think.

No calendar view, cause that seems of limited usefulness for this sort of site, but I think I could be convinced otherwise.


Anyway, that is my first proposal. I am happy to draw up others/change this one. I have some more advanced ideas for this one that we could implement, but please take a look and let me know if this looks like something we would be interested in doing.

Well, if we aren't going to put regional clubs on the top, that is fine. I could always put a link to the Cabinet materials right there instead. Or perhaps just put the cabinet stuff as one of the first row links instead, if we think that regional clubs will become more prominent in the future.

I agree that Donate to IMSA is probably very "money-focused" and Give back to IMSA may be better wording.

As for whitespace, etc.... I did not spend a lot of time refining the design, I just put together a general layout. So fonts, colors, etc are still in a rough form as I did not want to bother with coding up too much outside of Plone. I am pretty OCD about these things, so it will be pixel-perfect when I am done.

I abstracted the current events and alumni search boxes by not giving them a white background but still put them in the middle of the content because they are "main content" items, but not necessarily the same as news. There is a generic search on the top of the site, and a more focused alumni search in the main body. I specifically excluded a monthly calendar based format as our events are not in the same geographic area, thus knowing an event is on the 12th is kind of useless without more detail such as location. Those sort of monthly calendars would make more sense under regional clubs, where a glance at a calendar will tell you what is near you.

FUTURE THOUGHTS- DRAWING ALUMNI IN
As we get the basic infrastructure of the site in place, I would love to incorporate more alumni-focused activity on the front page to try and draw people in. Technical implementation will be the problem for the most part, but there are just thoughts I have:

1. We could have a banner image contest every so often. People could submit banner art and we could let people vote on it to select new banners which could go into regular random rotation.

2. The "From the community" section could function as a meta-weblog of IMSA. We could let people sign up their blogs, pull up recent entries, filter out those that have any "naughty" language or terms, and display recent entries from the community as they are posted.

3. We could add a small overlay Twitter/Facebook status box to do the same (pull alum updates if they opt in) which would be kind of fun as well.

4. We should have proper forums, but they might require moderation which is time consuming and resource intensive. So that might be out.

5. I want to tie in the user profiles with some sort of linked up professional networking. So that if I am an IMSA alum in law (which I am), I can find other IMSA alum in the same field. Perhaps this can be done just by farming it out to LinkedIn, but I feel that it might present some advantage to tie in alums to the alumni site a bit. What we should do is try and collect info on the user profile page and then have an advanced search to let people search different fields.

6.

While each of these might have technical implementation difficulties, they are not high priority, but would involve the community more, incorporating some aspects of social networking but in a decentralized manner.

Thanks, Tarun!

Some thoughts and notes:
- I very much like the idea of putting the likely-most-used links at the top.
- I also like using the body of the page to display recent news and events. That's been requested before, and is something I'd planned to do once we get the site on the new server.
- Totally agreed on RSS and iCal links for news and events. If you look at the current site, events already have iCal and vCal information. The current version of Plone supports RSS for stuff like this as well, so again, once we're on the new server, it'll be a matter of flicking a switch.
- iaa.org will be going away. The domain is not under the control of the IAA Cabinet. www.iaa.org points to our server as a courtesy extended to us by the current domain owner. imsaalumni.org is owned by us. (Specifically, me, but I'm happy to transfer it to another member of the Cabinet when I leave, or to the Alumni Association itself, if it ever gains any existence as an entity that's legally capable of owning things.)
- I don't see a need to create a second website, especially with the top navigation and the front page containing information of interest to the general community. Creating a second website increases maintenance overhead, and makes it unclear where content is located. (I.e., "is that an internal IAA matter or an external one"?)
- Do we have enough content to justify a "Regional Clubs" tab at this time? ...Do we /have/ any regional clubs, per se?
- I'd wonder if "Donate to IMSA" should be retitled. I'm assuming here that this would lead to a page where people could donate "time, talent, or treasure" (i.e., MyIMSA or a PayPal page for the IMSAFund). If that's the case, I'd wonder if "donate to IMSA" would leave the implication that we're only asking for money, and would make people less likely to follow the link. Maybe "Give back to IMSA"?
- General design notes:
* More whitespace, please! Especially in the left margin...
* The upcoming events and alum search boxes sitting in the body of the page seem awkward. Search boxes especially are generally placed outside the main page content, either to the side or above. Right now, it looks like the search and events boxes are cramping the main content, making the page look busy == less readable.

1. I already emailed Tarun my initial comments, but I like his initial mockup. This is pretty much what I envisioned for the site. I like the idea of having a rotating banner

2. I would add a "Cabinet" link along with the main links (Get Connected, etc.). That should be separate enough that we can put cabinet-related junk.

3. Is there any functionality that we need to add to the site? I'm not talking about RSS feeds and such, but rather services and information that would be of interest to alumni that we are not currently supplying. For examples, we can turn to our individual college alumni pages (mine is at http://www.cualumni.com/) for inspiration. I think we can tackle the redesign separately from adding to the functionality of the site.

4. I'm assuming implementing the design should be a matter of retooling the Plone templates and such?

5. I see CoreBlog is waiting to be installed... Should we go with a blog format for the front page / dissemination of information, or is the news item functionality of Plone better suited?