Welcome fellow Commoners!

We’ve reached the last leg of the race and are racing for the finish line! It’s a time of the semester when everyone is busy and our inboxes are steadily filling. I’ll look at them, we promise ourselves, when classes are over. Many of them, and likely your inbox is like mine, are conference CFPs and my winter break will be busy sending in proposals to several conferences. That got me thinking this week about how a good conference website can really help promote a conference and to expand the constructive networks one builds at a conference into the digital world.

So this week I’m directing you to some of the good conference websites people have created on the Commons in the past year (conference organizers take note!). It’s some inspiration for the winter break!

The CUNY Games Conference – This is the fourth CUNY Games conference (you can visit their other conference websites, too!) and they have an impressively put together site using the newest WordPress theme. With a flashy header video and a smart use of images and fonts, this website looks pretty slick. Most importantly, it looks good on a mobile device, something that’s particularly important during the conference because that’s how most people will be accessing schedules!d

BMCC CUNY CUE Conference (Coordinated Undergraduate Education) – Another slick, mobile adaptive site. This site is paired down and the big, bold icons make navigation easy.

Fifth Biennial Literature and Law Conference – This site foregrounds the keynote speakers, so it’s clearly intended for promotion prior to the conference. It functions as a digital billboard that you can send people to with a simple web address. This site proves you don’t need fancy bells and whistles or a digital team to have a good conference website.

That’s it for this week. Hopefully these sites will spark some inspiration and, maybe, connect you to some resources on topics you’re interested in!

All the best,

Paul