Collaboration Chronicles

Collab21 needs a website redesign.

Our current index page

Our path forward is to use Wordpress as a CMS, and redirect all traffic to http://collab21.com, http://collaborationchronicles.com, http://workshopwednesday.com and http://sharksinthepark.com to one site. So we need a theme and layout design for the CMS.

Rather than have one person do it for free, we thought we’d try something new. This will allow us to see how successful we are at collaboration with each other and with readers of this blog. My first task is to spend some time figuring out everything that needs to be created in terms of assets (images, color schemes, logo, etc). I can create the framework for it, and have anyone who wants to submit designs for certain assets following guidelines developed by our user experience team. Guidelines will most likely just be font selection and color palate, but may not even include that.

I got the idea from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk[1] and watching a video of data visualizations shared by a co-worker[2]. I think breaking up the work like this is interesting. However, rather that offering payment, we will have a page of contributors and links to their sites. Collab21’s plan is still to be a collaborative company and the more press we get, the more opportunity there is for sending traffic to your site through us. If you’re interested in participating, please email benhenry AT collab21 DOT com with the subject “Collab21 Mechanical Turk”.

I’ll be focusing this week on getting a list of assets that we need to generate, and will post the available work by the end of the week.

I’m really excited about our first collaborative project. I’ve got a few more ideas that should benefit all parties involved that can happen once we get a workshop, but until then we’re doing what we can to get off the ground.

[1] Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
[2] Aaron Koblin’s amazing data visualizations (sometimes) using Mechanical Turk

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 16th, 2009 at 10:36 am and is filed under Collaboration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.