AIChE has created a new website design system to enable a better visitor user experience and reflect modern web standards for desktop and mobile. This guide provides instruction on how to manage your site in this new design system. If your site hasn't migrated to the new system yet, you can access the user guide for the earlier system or make a request to schedule your migration.
FAQs: AIChE Entity Sites
AIChE offers its entities — local sections, divisions, forums, committees, and other approved groups — the ability to easily create and maintain websites. Learn about site benefits, content types, what's supported, and what's not supported.
What are the overall benefits of having an AIChE entity site?
- 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.
What specifically do AIChE entity sites offer?
- 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 the AIChE entity site system 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 an AIChE entity site 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.
What is not supported as part of this offering?
Custom web addresses
Your website’s address will be in the aiche.org/community/sites/[name-of-entity] format (e.g. http://www.aiche.org/community/sites/local-sections/st-louis or http://www.aiche.org/community/sites/divisions-forums/environmental-division). Short urls like http://www.aiche.org/st-louis can be created for marketing purposes. At this time, we are unable to support arbitrary domain names (e.g. http://www.MyPreferredName.org) in general.
Mailboxes and aliases
At this time AIChE is unable to provide generic mailboxes corresponding to your website’s address. Until such capability is available, if necessary, we can issue one email aliases (forwarding addresses) in the name@aiche.org format (not @yoursite.aiche.org). These email addresses will just forward emails to mailboxes designated by you and do not have features such as SPAM filtering, etc. Alternatively, you can use 3rd party email services or your own email addresses.
Broadcast e-mails
We recommend using http://mailchimp.com/pricing/
Highly structured system
Note that:
- The system is highly structured: there are standard “positions” for the logo, banner, navigation menu, etc. Similarly, the homepage has panes for ‘Announcements’, ‘Events’, and other types of content.
- The system 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.
- The system automatically includes related content from the main website: awards (from the AIChE awards database), lists of members and leaders (from the AIChE member database), and related videos (where applicable). This has the advantage of avoiding discrepancies between the main AIChE website and entity sites.
No custom programing
- Your designated entity web maintainer will not have access to low-level programming capabilities. The design system provides a growing number of click-&-configure features to meet common needs without any programming. The system aims to empower volunteers to publish content without requiring knowledge of HTML, CSS, scripting, database configuration, etc.
- Your designated entity webmaster will not have the ability to install custom software. While hosting is included in the solution, the offering is not a “hosting”-solution. If the need for a new software solution arises, we will work with you and other web maintainers to see if it is a shared requirement; if warranted and cost effective, we will extend the framework to meet the need for the benefit of all.
- The general principle and hope is that most websites will leverage the (many) features of the system, and preference will be given to adding new capabilities that can be used broadly (by all sites) rather than specially for one site.
Self-service
The offering does not include data entry services. Your designated entity webmaster(s) and other volunteers are expected to populate and maintain content. If you have an existing site, it cannot be automatically copied as-is to new environment; any existing content will have to be manually copied over by your designated web maintai er. Additionally, since we do not control your old site, redirecting the old/existing domain names to the new site’s address is your responsibility.
No built-in payment system
- The offering does not include a payment service. You will have to select a simple-payment service (e.g. Paypal, Google Checkout, Amazon Payments, etc.) and establish an account with them in your organization’s name.
- At the time of writing this document, the framework has been tested with PayPal’s “Website Payment Standard” service and Authorize.NET (used by STS Local Section). Please check with AIChE websupport before committing to use other services.
- Please check with AIChE Finance department to confirm the propriety of setting up your own accounts for receiving payments.