Who created, maintains, and updates your organization's website?
Our website was created last year by Carrie Dellesky, a then senior member of our group. She undertook the task of totally revamping the current website and ended up creating an entirely new design. Carrie had no experience in creating websites previously, and took advantage of the help offered by the SOURCE and by the Science and Engineering Libraries Digital Union. Although a seemingly difficult task at first, she took her time and learned a great deal along the way.
After she graduated, Adam Proehl, a third-year member, was elected Webmaster and took over the responsibilities of maintaining the website. The new officer had big shoes to fill, as the website won the best student organization award last year. With a bit more experience than Carrie had, he takes great pride in running the site and keeps it up to date with the latest news, pertaining not only to our club, but also to the university's recycling efforts as a whole. Adam chose to keep the overall design of SFR's main site the same, but did end up overhauling the portion of the site dedicated to our biggest event of the year – Dump and Run. Because the event is so large, it needed it's own website and Adam worked to integrate the two so they would compliment each other nicely.
With elections just being held, Adam will now pass the reigns of Webmaster on to a first-year member of the club, Jenny Tvergyak. SFR will continue to keep the website run by its own own members and encourage those unfamiliar with the subject to get involved and express their creativity.
What makes your website outstanding?
The Students for Recycling website is so effective because it is clean, simple to navigate, and provides any visitor with resources to educate themselves on recycling.
When first seeing the site, one is greeted with a cool, consistent color palette of light greens and creams. The green reinforces the “green” nature of our group, and the cream is a nice compliment, with both colors not overpowering as to draw attention away from the site's content. Each page on the site is filled with valuable information, with pictures placed strategically to add visual interest. These pictures help put faces with the work we do and shows that there are real students behind our group.
Another factor leading to our site's effectiveness was designing it to be easy to get around. To make this possible, we kept the main navigation to a few links along the top of every page, that guide visitors to various sections of the site. By keeping the navigation consistent, browsers do not have to struggle to figure out where to go – rather, they know to go back to the top of the page to find the relevant link. A small factor in making the site accessible is also making it easy to find. We made sure Google ranked this search with the utmost priority, so when anyone searches the infamous search engine for “students” and “recycling”, our site is the first result. The standard web address was made easy to remember as well – www.studentsforrecycling.com and not the standard recycling.org.ohio-state.edu.
Lastly, our website works well because it provides a plethora of information pertinent to informing everyone, not only students, as to the work we do and ways to learn more on recycling. The website is kept up to date with the latest happenings in our club, so it is known where and when we are meeting, what events are taking place, and what has happened at past gatherings. We also make available resources for people to learn more about the environment in general and how it is affecting our community.
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