This document aims to keep every member informed about the construction of their website, to provide an ongoing platform for them to know about upcoming website-related voting decisions (or to open up aspects of the design and/or development to the same process), to suggest features and functionality, to look over other members’ suggestions, and to contribute their skills and ideas. The general format of this document will follow the typical web development process from user research, wireframing, and design to programming, testing, and production. As such, it is a living document that will be updated on a semi-regular basis.

Building a functioning website that meets our members needs is a balancing act between the aspirations and demands of the membership, the technology and resources available to the developers, and the collaboration between these two groups of people at key junctures. We are currently in the phase of development marked by the concept of wireframing, which involves designing grayscale, blocky versions of our website’s pages to represent their layout, location of semantic content, image blocks, text size and positioning, and a scale of visual importance. Take the wireframe for our homepage as an example…

We can immediately see where the header, navigation bar, footer, and page content will go and generally how this will look. Wireframing saves us a lot of time because the further along we get in the development process, the more painstaking it becomes to make changes to the website.

Our site is hosted by May First Movement Technology using a content management system called WordPress. The content WordPress is managing are things like pages, users, comments, settings, and more.

Research

Wireframing