Target Audience
This website was built for the Alpha Beta Gama International Business Honor Society at the Art Institute of California – Orange County. The website is intended to promote the club and give prospective members additional information regarding the club or the approval process.
Objective or Challenge
I was the designer/developer in the project that I worked on with 2 other people. The website needed to be designed for its target audience and display information about the club its membership process. The site also needed an area where pictures of the Executive board could be seen so the prospective members could see who to look for on campus should they have any questions. The Members page also needed to display a dynamic list of current student members and alum. A news section was needed so that current and prospective members could see updates to the club or information regarding upcoming events.
Solution
Working as a group, it is important for there to be constant communication and for everyone to have the most update version of the files, so we decided to use Google Wave to stay in contact and to share files along with using Dropbox.
Even though this club is a little conservative in nature, and has chapters at prestigious colleges and universities across the country, this chapter is here at the Art Institute in Orange County. So I designed it to have its own identity from the national site. I used many creative elements in the background as well the use of Red to show school spirit. The logo I designed to look like it was a sticker place on the site to play off of the student lounge environment of fliers and stickers posted up on the events board. While the site is designed in a fun and creative manner, the content is laid out on grid to show structure and to go along with the business nature of the club. I decided to incorporate a link to the clubs Facebook page in the header so current and prospective members could join it, since Facebook is a popular social network among college students and is used by a majority of the members.
The members page uses PHP, to pull content from the database regarding its members. The Executive board has images associated with their names. The website has a content management system where the administrator can update this information and images of the Executive board. Below that there is a section of current members still enrolled in school. This section is dynamic, so it will grow if more members are added to the database. I coded this with PHP to grab the list of members from the database that aren’t in the executive board, and divide the total number by 3 to distribute them in 3 columns. The last section on the page is similar to the current members area, but displays alumi. The status of members can also be updated in the CMS, and a student would automatically swap into the alumni section if the information were to be updated.
For the news page, I designed it to be easy for administrators to post updates about the club. While updating the information of member status is done via the CMS, that is something that only needs to be done every once in awhile. On the other hand, posting updates to the Current News section would be something that would be done more often. I decided to use FBML to incorporate a stream of the ABG Facebook page on the website to make it easier for admins to update this info. A Facebook fanpage allows for multiple admins to be assigned to it, passing along the login information to post new event information doesn’t become a trivial task.