Developing the Website

The website is our point of contact for the program. This page will start with primarily promotional materials and an FAQ drawn from the value proposition. It also hosts the registration form which we're using presently to enroll families and educators. Eventually, it will become a hub for weekly Zoom Q&A sessions with scientists and activities.

Before building the resource I met with our digital assets team to discuss protocols and the technology used in the content management system. Luckily I've been developing website for many years, so the basics of page creation were not that challenging. It was more of an issue of learning the required formatting and styling. It's also an important part of our mission to make our website as accessible as possible, which means paying special attention to things like alt text for images and high-contrast colors for action items like buttons. The digital team had a variety of resources prepared which were really helpful.

Timing was a challenge though. I did not have the finalized artwork early enough to include on the initial website, which had to be published before the promo call-out on the radio broadcast. Also, because our manager of impact strategy was injured in a car accident, I wasn't able to have the registration form active at the time of the website rollout. Instead, I directed interested people to a newsletter form and collected email addresses that way. As soon as the registration was available it was added to the website and folks were notified via email to register. The benefit was that I added quite a few people to our Science Friday Educate newsletter.

The website will continue to evolve as the project does. For example, I now need to add information about our weekly speakers. And I want to add the materials lists for each week too, as enrollment in the program has already exceeded the number of kits I can provide.

UPDATE 10/20: Now that the program has launched the website has been revised. Each week towards the top there will be a section with specifics on the Q&A guests and details on the activities. There is a button directing participants to the YouTube channel for the live stream and a button to the project resource. Each week that box will move down and the new week's details will go above it. I didn't want to get rid of the overall schedule or FAQ, however. So I added some navigation to the top of the page.