Communications: Building Great Websites for Cohousing Communities and Professionals
Catya Belfer-Shevett
Building a great website starts with asking three questions: Who will be using this website? What do they want and need? What’s the easiest and most attractive way to help them find it? In this session we’ll start with the basics of identifying your users, go over categorization (aka information architecture) and how that plays into building site navigation, and talk about content, tools, and bells and whistles. Other website builders are more than welcome to attend and share your expertise!
Catya Belfer-Shevett is a cohousing 'burning soul'. My cohousing community, Mosaic Commons, is completing construction in Berlin MA and we will be moving in this fall after 8 years of work. I create websites for cohousing communities and others, including www.cohousing.org On the non-technical side, I am fascinated by how we build community through ritual, tradition, and song.
Related pages: Tools & Technologies
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Best part: critiquing sites
Catya,
The best part of the session was the critique and discussion of participants' web sites. Could that activity be expanded into a workshop for 2009?
Jennifer
From Delaware Street Commons- IN KANSAS!
www.delaware-street.com
That sounds like an
That sounds like an excellent plan! I wonder if we should think about doing it as a half day workshop, really dive into examples?
Workshops in Seattle and in cyberspace
That's exactly what I was thinking, Catya. I liked having the live discussion and the give and take about the different sites.
Raines, your idea of doing virtual workshops is also intriguing. As a newbie webmaster I really, really appreciate the feedback on the "look and feel " of my site.
From Delaware Street Commons- IN KANSAS!
www.delaware-street.com
not just at the conference...
This seems like it would be a fun activity to do via conference call, or via the Rooms here directly... someone can post a URL in the forums and we can post some screen shots and discuss. Perhaps in the Technology and/or Marketing rooms.
Raines
who would have loved to have been at Catya's session if only he wasn't leading another one at the same moment!
If we got enough interest,
If we got enough interest, we could do it via chat!
help for communities that did not attend conference
Hi Catya,
What advice and help can you give us in helping us upgrade our website? We are Riverrock in Ft. Collins and are in the process of making our website more user-friendly and more effective as a means for helping us build community, How much do we get in touch with you if we are interested in you helping us?Thanks Laura B
Advice
Basic advice is free, past that see http://www.cohousing.org/node/683
I'd recommend that you create a login and check out the Technology section, also!
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