Once people have joined, why do they come back? For inspiration and help with a new project are two big reasons. But email from the site is number one – a reminder to come back and see what’s new.

That’s why we’ll be relaunching the newsletter soon. We’re looking forward to seeing members come back often, and contributing more.

These findings are based on a study carried out earlier this year by Carey Tisdal of Tisdal Consulting, St. Louis, Missouri.

• Bits – Those short posts we added a few months ago are now visible on the home page.

• Profiles – We’ve added a tabbed section and place for you to pull in info from other social networking sites like LinkedIn.

• Members page - We’ve added a sorting feature that highlights top contributors. Users without full names are no longer prioritized.

• Search – Improvements include more targeted search and more result relevance.

• Other improvements – We’ve improved browser compatibility and boosted speed.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing some of the results of the recent evaluation that helped us plan these and other changes still ahead. For now, many thanks to James Kassemi, Jim Spadaccini, and other members of the Ideum team; to Carey Tisdal, evaluator; and to our funder, the National Science Foundation.

We want to make it easy to add media so we are envisioning a system that would allow for direct uploads to the ExhibitFiles server or links to images on Flickr, videos on YouTube, along with other services.

Here’s a few mock-ups of how it might work. The first one shows the “Add” page, where members are asked what they would like to contribute to the ExhibitFiles site.

The next screen shows how the ‘Bits main page might look. (Obviously, the gray thumbnails would be populated with images.)

Finally, here’s a mock-up of an individual ‘Bits page. We’re hoping to add the ability to make comments that have associated media files. Notice there is an integrated media-player. This improvement would also be added to Case Studies and Reviews.

This is all preliminary and we’re still working through the details. I didn’t post the proposed form for adding ‘Bits, as this has many layers due to the multiple choices.  (There are lot’s of options for that screen, since we are allowing members to include images and video that already exists on external social media platforms).

We’re open to any comments or questions you might have about ‘Bits. We’ll let you know how this all progresses.

Other additions to the Browse page include a new thumbnail viewer as well as improved “sort” capabilities in the columns toward the bottom of the page. Case studies and reviews can now be displayed by Popularity, along with Title and Date. All of these changes should make it easier for members and visitors find entries of interest in the ExhibitFiles collection.

These are the major improvements and changes that you’ll find in the ExhibitFiles last this week:

Search – We’ve added the ability to search all of the site content (case studies, reviews, and member profiles). In addition, keywords, author names, and museum names will be clickable–allowing users to see all of the records that relate to those terms. This a major improvement over our temporary Google co-op search engine.

Comments – The ability to edit comments for up to 15 minutes after posting will be added. Web addresses that are in comments will be clickable.

Profiles – We’ve added the ability to embed RSS feeds from your blog or a favorite one. In addition, you can now add thumbnails of your latest photos from flickr automatically. (See the image above.) Also, you will be able to add co-authors to your list of publications and presentations.

Contacts – When you add someone to your contact list, they will receive an email letting them know that you’ve added them.

Favorites - Case studies and reviews will now display icons and links to the profiles of those members who have “favorited” an exhibit.

We’re still testing these new features, but we’ll send along a message once these enhancements are in place. See you on the ExhibitFiles.

Once you’ve joined and have logged in, you can edit your profile and update your thumbnail. We’ve developed a custom “thumbnailer” application in Flash that makes this easy. Just select “Upload a new image and create a custom thumbnail” and the image will be loaded into the program. You can then re-size and re-position the highlight square to make a selection.

In your profile, you can add links to “Recent publications & presentations.” It’s there that you can also select the option to “Accept Members Email Messages” allowing other ExhibitFiles members to contact you through e-mail. As you may already know, it’s also through your profile that you view and edit “drafts” of case studies and reviews.

As you browse the ExhibitFiles site, and view published case studies, reviews, and other member’s profiles, you can add them to your “Favorites” or “Contacts.” It is our hope that profiles will become a resource in their own right. As other visitors view your profile, they can see your contacts and favorites, and this becomes yet another way to discover reviews, case studies, and other members profiles.

Finally, if you have a profile you might want to try “Googling” yourself. I did and I was surprised to find my ExhibitFiles profile on page one. Our “pretty URLs” which include full names (www.exhibitfiles.org/jim_spadaccini), proper title tags, and the fact that the ExhibitFiles blog has been around a year helps with Google ranking. Having a case study or review published also helps–since there is a link from multiple pages on the ExhibitFiles site to the profile. As you can imagine, the case studies and reviews which have the same “Google-ready” qualities, are well ranked too.
As always, we welcome your comments and suggestions.

Our core team has been working with the ALPHA build for the last few weeks, and their comments have helped us fine tune the structure of the site as work toward BETA. (The latest site diagram above is available as a PDF.) One of our main concerns has been to make this site as responsive to the needs and ways of working of exhibit practitioners — including time constraints. So we’ve been simplying and clarifying while working out bugs. Work has begun on the final phase which will lead to a BETA release. We’ll be publishing that release date soon.

We have made great progress, we have functional forms and a database that is collecting information. We’ll soon be adding the ability to comment and we’re still, of course, squashing bugs. The ALPHA site will be available in early January. We will post a message, and at that time, you can email us for access to try the site out.

Ruby on Rails (the framework that we are using to build the site) presented some challenges at first, but we are becoming increasingly confortable in the environment. Overall, it does some things really well, while other tasks have been made more difficult. The rails community online has been helpful, posts like Things You Shouldn’t Be Doing in Rails have helped us work through some unexpected problems.

The ALPHA site will run for the entire month of January. During that month we’ll be working on finalizing design details and looking at how to best present, search, and sort the information in the collection. In our next post, we’ll invite you to check out the ALPHA.