Ford Hall Forum is the nation's oldest free public lecture series. Since 1908 the Ford Hall Forum, a nonprofit educational organization, has dedicated itself to promoting and facilitating public involvement in the open exchange of ideas on issues of public interest through the presentation of free lecture programs that actively engage diverse audiences in discussion and debate.
What the Forum needed was a way to keep members and interested parties abreast of their upcoming schedule. They also wanted to increase their organization's accessible for people with questions about the Forum. With limited manpower and budget, the Forum also wanted to promote itself better in order to increase their membership. It was decided that a website could address all of these needs.
For site design, the Forum wanted something clean, intuitive and practical. They also wanted to carry over certain graphical layout elements so that the site would be recognized as part of the Forum's overall look. In creating the site I began with the traditional left-side navigation bar using mouseovers to indicate which section the viewer was currently in. For branding I added the Forum's torch and motto which were optimized and animated to give the site movement without burdening dialup visitors with a large download. I utilized javascript popup windows to minimize the amount of clicking needed to view information. An example would be the "Current Season of Programs" section in which clicking on the title of the program launches the popup window (click here to view the program window pop-up). In the resulting window the visitor has the opportunity to print the details of the lecture as well as using the convenient and more intuitive "Close Window" text script to close the window. The same javascript principle was used in order to keep visitor on the site. When linking offsite, I have the link launch a separate browser window so that the visitor does not have to click the Back button to return to the Ford Hall Forum site. "Show/Hide layers" javascript in conjunction with layers on the index page allow the visitor to view additional information on a particular program when moused over.
