AIChE offers its entities — local sections, divisions, forums, committees, and other approved groups — the ability to easily create and maintain websites.
Overall benefits of AIChE Entity Sites
- encourage organizational entites to engage with their community—their local section, division, forum, committee, or council with announcements, blog posts, events, newsletters, slideshows, and other content.
- enable volunteers to quickly and easily publish information without a deep knowledge of HTML/CSS and programming
- achieve a basic level of branding consistency amongst AIChE websites
- reduce total costs.
Specific AIChE entity site offerings
- A professional looking entity website, with an easy to use Web Content Management System (CMS) with the ability to:
- Ability to easily create blog posts, announcements, photo slideshows, basic web pages and upload newsletters (PDFs)
- Integration with AIChE database auto populates all organizational entity leadership (officers, chairs, etc.) and group members.
- One login! Allows for members to easily login with their AIChE.org login credentials
- Integration with AIChE.org auto populates awards and award winners to avoid duplicates and multiple entry
- A system that aims to automate routine web work: e.g. “Announcements” will automatically disappear after specified expiry-dates, “Events” will automatically move from ‘Upcoming’ to ‘Recent’, etc.
- Ability to edit content in a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. NO knowledge of HTML required.
- Easily organize your web pages using a navigation structure
- Create web-based forms and contact forms to collect any data (collect data in Spreadsheet format or via email)
- Hosting for your website
- Documentation & support
- One-time “startup” assistance (only upon request, if documentation does not suffice)
- Perpetual support via email (Web@aiche.org). We will react to live production problems quickly; however, due to limited resources, please be prepared for at least 5 business days lead-time for first response to non-critical questions/issues.
What technology is it based on?
AIChE entity websites are based on a customized implementation of the popular Drupal Content Management System (CMS) and, along with all AIChE sites, are hosted by Acquia, who specializes in Drupal. Drupal is used by tens of thousands of websites.
What does it cost?
We have designed this service to minimize costs while maximizing value. Specifically, by using shared software and hardware infrastructure, per-site costs are kept low. However, due to limited staff supporting a large number of sites, “owners” are expected to self-build and maintain sites based on this infrastructure.
For AIChE entities, the service and solution is FREE.
Note that discount providers on the web charge $48-$120/year just for hosting services, offer no support, no mechanisms for ensuring consistency and integration across different websites, and no strategy for future growth.
Having said that, and while we believe that this is a good service, you should be aware of things that are NOT currently supported.