New Intermountain-STC Chapter Site

by Tom Johnson on Aug 13, 2009
categories: technical-writing • wordpress

We launched a new website for the STC-Intermountain chapter this week. We're using WordPress as the platform. The theme is Streamline from Studio Press. One of the more interesting parts of the site is our Member List page, which shows every registered site user. Usually WordPress only allows you to generate a list of site authors. Authors are people who have written a post. But with the Member List plugin, you can show users of any role. The names of the users listed on the Member List page link to the author pages, where you can read an extended profile of the member.

In trying to come up with a strategy for the site, we wanted to put news on the front page, with meetings and jobs as the prominent buttons. The news, jobs, and meetings pages are post categories, so adding new posts updates the RSS feed, which also auto-generates a new post across Twitter. One of the jobs pages also incorporates a feed from Indeed.com, which provides more listings than the few jobs submitted by local companies.

The front page has a lot of images, which it pulls into a flash slideshow from the Featured Content Gallery plugin. It's part of the Streamline theme, but you can incorporate this plugin into any WordPress site.

I've launched a few sites before, and I can tell you that the content is almost always more interesting than the format. People may raise an eyebrow about the new design, but unless the content is engaging, the site will lack appeal. Because of this, we're trying to feature more regular news on the home page. These news articles may include member spotlights, president's messages, reviews about articles in the the STC magazines, notes from board meetings, announcements about chapter meetings, and anything else we can conjure up.