Custom Designing Your Website

There are many services out there that will offer templates for high school reunion websites. They are better than nothing, but if you want something a little less boilerplate, you'll have to make it yourself.

If you have a dedicated web designer in your class who will willing to volunteer his/her services, as we were fortunate enough to have, (thank you Jan Reisen of http://www.perfectisite.com/) you can custom design a site to meet your needs. Make sure your designer understands that this website will have a life long after the reunion and that he/she is an intrinsic part of the reunion committee forever and ever.

Jan understood this and has exceeded our expectations time and time again.

She designed our site based on a few basic components we felt we had to have.
1. A news page for updates about the reunion
2. An on-line yearbook (our directory) with blogs on each page to write messages to classmates and a in-memoriam page
3. A place to upload photos with instructions. We chose http://www.shutterfly.com/
4. A blog for general comments which we call the Graffitti page
5. The lost list, which is updated daily.
6. and a page to buy Tickets using Paypal.

We thought about a "paid" advertisements page, but never acted on it. Later on we may add a page to upload the reunion video. But for now these are the elements we have working under the KSS (Keep it Simple Stupid) motto. No need to make it too complex. Maintaining it is challenging enough.

Please let us know what's in your website. We'd love to hear about it.

Comments

Unknown said…
Probably one of the most important considerations is how to keep the site updated. We built the LHS Class of '69 site using Movable Type content management. There's virtually no programming involved in updating most of the content. That way you can mobilize some volunteers to help or designate a deputy content boss.

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