Website update - February 2012
21 February 2012
Dear all,
Over the past few days, we've been making some changes to the website. In this article, we give you a brief overview of these changes + we provide some more information about the alumni login section.
VISUAL, NOT TEXTUAL
The first thing you see when you visit a website is its homepage. It is by far the most important page of the site. We believe that this page should contain the most important information, but we also believe that putting tons of text on it is not the way to do this. Sometimes, 'a picture says more than a thousand words'. And that is why we decided to cut the unneeded text from the homepage.
What is left, are three things:
- Latest news - A banner displaying the 3 most recent news articles. Only the visual of each article is displayed, giving you the most important information the article is about. Clicking the visual redirects you to the article. To browse all present and past articles, you can click on the link to the news archive. The news archive has also been redesigned. Instead of having to read through an endless list of article titles, you just have to scroll to the visuals of the articles, ordered per month.
- Video - The most recent video of our YouTube channel is also displayed on the frontpage. It gives you a direct impression of what (a specific part of our) sessions is all about.
- Photo - The newest feature on the homepage is the slideshow of our Flickr photostream. Just like video, a photo gives us a good impression of what makes our sessions special.
As you can see, 'visual' is the keyword in this website update. We hope this will make it more fun to browse through the stuff the homepage features.
OUR NEWS IN A WORLD LANGUAGE
Together with the homepage changes, we decided to change the way we communicate our news. The past six months, we've been posting our news articles in 3 languages (Dutch, French, English). It was clear, however, that this is not the most efficient way of communication. Creating a news article in three languages, takes a large amount of time. So we asked all sorts of visitors of our website whether or not they find it necessary to have the news available in all of these languages. Most of them found English sufficient.
We provide news that is - most of the time - meant for the international EYP community, so it seemed logical to us that English is the best language to write our articles in. We also believe that people who are interested / involved in the European Youth Parliament have a knowledge of English that is sufficient to understand our news articles. Therefore, we will not publish our articles in Dutch and French anymore. This gives us the opportunity to provide news reports in a quicker way.
ALUMNI LOGIN SECTION
The alumni login section has also received an update of its main page. Our new way of communicating the news, has also been implemented on this page.
But what information does the alumni login section offer?
The alumni login section is meant for Belgian alumni of EYP-Europolis Belgium. Every Belgian who has participated in at least one EYP-Europolis session can register. Mails concerning your registration, might end up in your spam-folder. So make sure to check this once in a while.
Content of the alumni login section:
- Updates on internal news matters
- Alumni calendar with all EYP-Europolis events / sessions / ... on it
- Internal registrations forms for EYP-Europolis events
- Session Call Centre giving you a clear overview of the most recent calls for officials / participants / ... on international level, with all necessary information included
- Downloads section with international guides, internal meeting reports (e.g. board reports), ...
- EYP-Europolis wiki
When you sign up for the alumni section, you will also receive a monthly newsletter with the latest updates. Register and stay tuned!
