Website revamp plan

Goals for the new website (as I understand them):

1. Communication among current scholars, fellows, alumni, and FICRS Support Center staff.
2. Outreach to potential candidates for Scholars and Fellows programs

Therefore, to facilitate these goals, I propose the following changes in the organization of the website.

New top-level organization:

Replace current tabs with five new ones

1. About the Support Center*
2. Scholars Program*
   
3. Fellows Program*
4. Members
5. Research

*The first three tabs I consider lowest priority as the new scholars and fellows orientation looms nigh.

Members section:

The first thing we ought to offer is different ways of finding members: by country, by research interest, what else? Then, within these "country" pages or "research area" pages, we would link to those message boards and specific resources for those folks.

Changes to the structure of the way member information is entered will take some time, but for now we can use keywords applied to members. Right Eric????

We had talked about adding form fields like "previous positions held", schools attended, etc.

The Bio-Book ought to still be available as a full on PDF, but I want to pull much of this information out (including pictures) and get it in the individual members profiles.

Also, I'd like to see a resources section within the Members section. Right now the website doesn't offer much to Scholars and Fellows (S&F) except message boards. To bring them in there should be stuff here they need: important materials from orientation, links to external info about their country, etc.

Also, we need to engage alumni. It looks like many have created profiles, but I'd like to find at least one alumni from each country that we can promote on the website as a go-to resource for new S&F headed out to that country. We could eventually use them as message board moderators as well.

Research section:

This one frightens me a bit. Our eventual goal is to get that monstrous bibliography integrated and searchable within the website. The best way to do will be to create a template people can use to submit their research, including full abstracts and external links to PubMed (or wherever). Eric, any great ideas?

I want to make sure we're all on the same page before I start tearing this thing down. Please let me know if I'm leaving anything out or haven't contacted anyone I needed to. Feedback only makes the site better.

Also, we talked about waiting to make any huge visual changes until I met more of the stake holders at the orientation.

What about making all the poeple that worked a a particular country a member of a group? We'd have a South Africa group, a Zambia group, etc.

Kevin,

Agreed re a visual overhaul. let's see first what utility the website can provide. Cat infoms me the scholars already are using a social networking tool (facebook), and I doubt you would get anyone to switch to something they don't know. OPly a few of them actually are maintaining a blog.

For the Scholars/Fellows split we have already talked about having a front page that is a splash screen to guide Scholars & fellows to separate parts of the site. The assumption here is that the scholars will not interact with the Fellows but that may be wrong.

the best place to start I think is a proper member directory that is more rich than the plain Plone member directory. Starting point can be the FacultyStaff plone product for academic departments,  adapt that to include categories for "scholars" and "Fellows" (should be very easy), and extend that with some other fields. Allow people to upload an html bibliography created from their reference manager of choice, and embed that transparently on the page. As you indicated, populate the Member descriptions from content from the BioBook.  If we do this right we can reuse the same solution for an FGH FacultyStaff directory.

You should proceed with migration to Plone 3 ASAP though (just reuse the old default Plone look), because all the latest modules target Plone3.

Agreed. Regarding fogartyscholars.org vs. Facebook, I think we could aim to connect S&F with alumni and us, as they are already interconnected via Facebook. I'd like to contact some alumni directly and ask them to sign up for the RSS feed for these message boards, so we can tell S&F that there are people listening if they ask a questions here.

Previously Kevin Harvey wrote:

Goals for the new website (as I understand them):

1. Communication among current scholars, fellows, alumni, and FICRS Support Center staff.
2. Outreach to potential candidates for Scholars and Fellows programs

 

Hi Kevin,

 

If this website is the prime recruiting tool, may I suggest more color/ pictures? I think compared to the previous AAMC website it is not quite as flashy simply by virtue of not being as brightly colored.  I know that's purely cosmetic, but in reality this program competes for applications with a variety of other polished marketers/webpages. If students have no previous information on the programs through connections with people who have done them (as I did not when applying), websites say a lot. To a generation not quite as focused on internet communication it might seem like there would be little return, but if I think about what websites I will spend time reading -interesting design holds my attention longer regardless of content. 

 

Hopefully I am not quite as superficial as I seem by this posting.

 

Rebecca,

Thanks for your input. You're absolutely right. We're working on a brand new design that we'll launch (hopefully very) soon. I hope I can come to you for honest feedback on it. I'll start a new topic in this forum after we get the new design up. The site is for folks like you, so any/all opinions are sincerely appreciated.

Kevin