Conversation Hub Rebuilt
Jul 10th, 2008
Kevin Werbach was in trouble. He was coordinating activities for Supernova 2008 and had used a local connection (i.e. cheap labor) to redesign Conversation Hub, the conference’s weblog. The new design was good but it was executed with old technology that just didn’t integrate with WordPress. Moreover, it was a cross-browser mess. Blogs do things differently than the webtools many designers are still using to create brochureware. They tend to use simple lists and rely on CSS for layout and positioning rather than nested tables. This makes for faster rendering, easier modifications and better search engine visibility.
Conversation Hub was also running on a very old version of WordPress and needed an upgrade to take advantage of the newer editing and media management tools and plug-ins available. I was able to upgrade the site, lay in the design changes and install/configure the new plug-ins in plenty of time to meet the conference deadlines.
