QUT's Bluewire Media Prize for Web Design 2007

By GREG YOUNG (2007 Prize Winner)

MARCH 25th, 2008

Our team entry for the competition was created for Arlis/ANZ - the Arts Libraries Society Australia and New Zealand. This organisation promotes arts librarianship, and we worked on their new website as part of "Design Studio 2: Web Development" at QUT. We are all undertaking a Bachelor of Creative Industries (Communication Design) and the course is a second year subject, where we learn and then customise Drupal, an open source content management system.

Our team consisted of 5 members in the following roles:

• Sheryl Hills – Project Manager
• Jess Golding – Design
• Michael Nyberg – Design
• Matt Luscombe – Technical
• Greg Young – Technical

With over 160 members in Arlis/ANZ, we focussed on building a site that provides multiple avenues of communication. Features include an executive blog, forums organised by chapter, live online chat, image galleries, and embedded video. Members can register with the site to gain access to extra content, and e-commerce has been integrated to take membership and conference registration payments. This level of functionality enables the site to be used as a one-stop community portal. The Arlis/ANZ site is now live and being used by more members every week.

Development took place over 8 weeks, with continual client consultation. We used custom PHP and available modules for Drupal in order to implement the desired functionality. The success of the project has proved to be a valuable experience to all of us, which will no doubt be useful when taking on similar projects in the future.

Winning the Bluewire Media Prize has given us the satisfaction of knowing our site is recognised beyond the bounds of university. The $500 prize-money was also greatly appreciated – some of us have used it to purchase new software, while others have taken it straight to the pub!