Introduction
The goal of this report is to keep both the IACWEB team and the IAC leadership apprised of our progress to date, tasks remaining, and any major open issues.
Please submit any public questions or comments using the comment form below. Please direct anything of a sensitive nature to me via my contact form, or call me at 303-619-4814.
Accomplishments
Nationals Web Site
We ran into a timing problem with the 2012 Nationals because the contest web site needed to be up and running well before the full IAC site was ready. So Tim Walter and I created a separate Nationals mini-site on the IAC server using the same Drupal content management system. In addition to fulfilling the contest's short-term needs, the mini-site also proved out the technology and provided valuable operational experience.
Features:
- 39 pages of content
- General Info
- Jury Decisions
- Retrieve and display Twitter messages
- Photo gallery
Traffic, Sept. 22 through Oct. 1:
- 2,635 unique visitors
- 88% from the U.S.
- 27% from Texas (73% of visitors were following the Nationals from afar)
- 41% mobile (vs. 16% for www.iac.org)
- 32,484 page views
- Home page: 37%
- Photo gallery: 28% (multiple pages)
- Results: 7%
- Schedule: 6%
- Average page load: 2.92 seconds, but spiky
There was a second "bump" of 585 visits on Oct. 8, coinciding with publication of In the Loop, which linked to the photo gallery. Average page load time was 14.09 sec.
Conclusions:
- The sub-par response times occurred during periods of heavy traffic due to memory constraints. This was partially addressed by modifying the Apache configuration parameters, but further tuning and/or additional memory is required.
- The Drupal web framework let us set up the site with only a few days of effort, and provided more than adequate functionality. Adding last-minute features (Twitter mirror and photo gallery) was fast and easy.
- Configuring site functionality requires a Drupal-savvy administrator, but the learning curve for content authors and editors is fairly easy.
New IAC Site
Unfortunately the new site is far behind schedule due to webmaster's personal bandwidth and the difficulty of farming out highly technical tasks. On the upside, the great bulk of the Phase 1 ("Parity Release") tasks are behind us.
- Finished "theming" for desktop users (screen resolution of 1024x768 or greater)
- Organized all pages into menus and "views"
- Identified and re-connected "orphan" pages
- Fixed some of the remaining broken links; relatively few still need to be fixed
- Edited many legacy pages to improve appearance and fix out-of-date content
- Devised cut-over procedures for replacing the old-tech www.iac.org site with the new Drupal site
- Purchased SSL security certificate to protect user passwords, email contents, etc.
- Authored several "boilerplate" pages (site FAQs, advertising guidelines, credits, etc.
- Eliminated many PDF files by copy/pasting their contents into a web page
- Updates and additions to the Webmaster's Guide
Next Steps
- Theming for tablets and smart phones
- Upgrade the OS to the latest release
- User-related features
- Notifications of new content, with unsubscribe option
- Logic to regulate the rate at which users are added (e.g. 100 per day)
- Decide what content should be for members only
- Gray out members-only content for non-members
- Create "Welcome" email for new users
- Etc.
- Beta test
