Today I emailed the TA of the UCI Digital Art class and sent him this mission statement of what our class believes is the purpose of Anteatr.com:
Our goal for Anteatr.com is to create a community where digital arts students at UC Irvine, past, present and future can post and showcase their art, videos, writing, and more. We want to make a safe public space to share our ideas and just generally encourage people to think about digital arts. The site can then become an archive left behind of all the students who pass through the Digital Arts minor, whether their personal blog sites remain up or not. Their work will be preserved. Where the official Digital Arts Minor site is more academic, displaying only the best of the minor, Anteatr gives everyone a chance to display their work. It would be more personal and student-oriented than an academically informative site because we want people to see what we’ve done and who we are. In order to remain involved even after graduation, we want to create memberships, so current, past, and potential Digital Arts students can interact and have a chance to showcase their ideas and art.
Unsurprisingly, our previous wireframes failed. They failed because we broke the golden rule of web design: design only after you know what content the website will have. Now this mission statement merely provides us, the design team, a software framework. A software framework that deals with abstract functions such as organizing posts and a membership model. Since no actual content is provided to us, all that can be done now is information architecture (site map and membership system). I jotted down some notes after reading the mission statement:
When a student posts their thoughts or their artwork on Anteatr, does this post get directly published on the front page or in a sub-section under their name? Is the front page moderated by an editor or is it going to be a news feed like Facebook, where it shows the latest posts made by students?
Are we going to require students to setup their personal blog under the Anteatr CMS or are we linking up with their own blogs?
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I’m proposing the sitemap be organized into two major sections: A front-page that showcases either the latest posts or posts selected by an editor; sub-sites for each student (you can organize this further by class year). Now these sub-sites can either be blogs that students directly post to or automatically generated from the blogs that students create themselves.
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After agreeing upon the sitemap, the next step is asking what kind of posting privileges should certain members have? Do we restrict each student to only post under their subseciton? Are potential students, like the general public, only allowed to make comments?
