Presentation reaction

I am pleased with the group presentation we put together for last week. We piled as much information into 30 minutes as possible to give everyone an idea for our website design. We hope we got the point across that our focus was on building a site from the ground up as opposed to dissecting the current site and picking and choosing things to keep and eliminate. Of course, we took much of the current site into consideration in our design, and we looked at many other dot orgs websites to get a feel for what others are doing right and wrong.

Special thanks to Constance, Craig, Nancy, and Caroline (the SIPA student who worked on an IJDH project last semester and was a guest of ours for the presentation). We hope to expand on our thoughts and hit any missed issues in our final report. We were able to get in touch with Monica from IJDH once already since our presentation, and they are looking forward to reading our report and proposing a website enhancement based (well, hopefully) on our recommendations.

http://www.ijdh.org/

And on it goes...!

Although it's nice to be finished with the presentation, we really need to devote time now to finishing up the final report.

I think we're on track, its just a matter of trying to include and remember all the suggestions and ideas that have crossed our minds over the past 4 months!

One thing we definitely need to address- which was highlighted by the judges during our presentation- is the news/blog dilemma. Should the blog be under "News"? Should news articles just be incorporated into the blog?

Also, the suggestions to feature the blog directly on the homepage were interesting, and worth reflecting.

Showtime!

Here is a mockup of a IJDH homepage. My group sketched it and Anatoly, my go to web developer, designed it.

Lessons learned

I think we all definitely learned a lot from the presentations done by the Lend-a-hand India and UNANIMA teams- it was useful for us to see how they confronted their main challenges.

Not only was it helpful for us to gauge what works and what doesn't work as well when it comes to presentations, but watching these groups helped us better articulate our own priorities and challenges.

We still have a lot of work to do, but things seem to be coming together! I'm looking forward to the presentations next week~~

Is it possible?

At our meeting this week, we took a step back to figure out whether our recommendations are feasible given IJDH's resources. The most likely answer is yes, but no. Thus, we have clearly defined our short run recommendations and our long run recommendations. We wanted to give them reasonable goals that they could immediately implement, as well as more ambitious goals to strive for in the future.

The good news is that we learned that Brian and Monica will be taking our presentation and report to a board meeting in which they had already been planning on making a proposal pitch for funding for website development. So, it is possible that our analysis and recommendations will see the light of day sooner than we though with appropriate funding and the hiring of a professional web development team. As our clients will not be present during our presentation, we will not know exactly what aspects of our project they plan to undertake, but we are open to meeting with them when they come to a conference in New Jersey in early May to clarify anything in our report if they have questions. Otherwise, the future of IJDH's website looks like it is in good hands for a possible revamping!

http://www.ijdh.org/

A Work in Progress

This is a homepage sketch by Ker with input from Jacqueline, Nick and myself. We still have a lot of work to do, but we're making progress.

What to do with video?

It has been interesting for me to figure out how IJDH can best incorporate video into their website. Part of me feels as though its a new, interesting medium that is relatively easy to add to websites, yet at the same time, I feel that lots of the material that IJDH would likely put on their website would fall prey to the "talking head" syndrome.

Hopefully there are good, interesting documentaries available to supplement or replace the current videos of lectures and talks on the websites(even if they do feature Matt Damon!).

...for further investigation!!!