Dave Sabol

Description: When the Orchestral Director of the Nazareth Area School District’s String Program asked me to create a website for her, I couldn’t refuse (I really couldn’t – she’s my wife). In all seriousness, Laura wanted to create a site that would allow her to easily post and update information for her students and parents and serve as a critical linkage for home-school communication.

I decided to use WordPress as the engine for the site because the interface is very easy to learn and I knew from past experience that it had the core functionality that would allow it to accomplish everything it needed to with a little creative coding. The site features a fully functional event / activity calendar, the blog which is used to post news and homework assignments and a lot of other features that every teacher needs to have a well-rounded website. The coding for this site was done in Coda and all of the graphics were created with Gimp.

Background

A few months prior to ASAE’s Annual Conference in 2008, Jeff De Cagna of Principled Innovation approached me with the idea to create a blog-of-blogs, also known as a universe site, to aggregate the association world’s most well known bloggers. The goal of the project was really three-fold: first to make it easier to find association related resources in one location, second was to drive traffic back to the blogger’s websites, and third it had to be almost entirely automated – as little user/administrator intervention as possible. It was understood from the beginning that the site needed to be extremely accessible, content rich and highly interactive.

After a few weeks of discussion we settled on the idea of using WordPress as the engine largely due to the fact that more than half of our featured bloggers had experience with it and should they need to actually log-in to make changes, post updates or respond to comments.

Platform: Wordpress 2.7
Responsibilities:Initial idea, information architecture, graphic design, coding.