Inside the SAM Website redesign (Part I)

For those that don’t know, I recently returned to San Jose State University to wrap up my business management degree - it turns out that little piece of paper is actually important! (I’m sure I’ll discuss that process and learning experience later on). When I came to campus, I made sure to keep my eyes open for a student organization that looked promising, and indeed I discovered the Society for the Advancement of Management. I looked at the organization much like I’ve looked at client work and business opportunities that have presented themselves. . . What is there to learn, what is there to gain, and what is there to improve?

With SAM, it became clear that where I could be the best help would be to assist the organization in developing a new standard for their website. The existing site featured simple graphics, wasn’t updated frequently enough, and was a delegation nightmare. Things have to be channeled through the webmaster to get updated, the site is in raw HTML, and even the calendar is a hassle to update (the calendar being, of course, one of the most important parts of a social student organization). So I took it upon myself to get involved with the web side of things, and it looks like we’re going to be doing a very high-speed revamp of the entire site.

I will post up, in the coming days, the process that I’m taking to revamp this organization’s website. I’m going to be posting these things for two reasons - for one I want to keep a record of how things are getting done, but for two, I want to show other small organizations how truly easy it can be to launch a professional-quality website using some of the available software on the web. The site will be done with an annual budget of $60.00, and that covers just hosting and domain name. As things progress, I’ll throw up some screenshots and demonstrate the basics of a fresh-start Wordpress installation, and how to create a site worth an organization’s time.