The ACS GEOC website was an interesting challenge. The American Chemical Society had previously hosted websites for its members were forums where news, images, and files could be posted. ACS GEOC was an active member of their hosted boards — so when ACS announced that it would discontinue these websites in 2021, they needed to find a new web solution.
From a design perspective, there was nothing problematic about the ACS Forums. They were clean, easy to navigate, and mobile responsive. The only downside to this website was that information was not necessarily organized in an instinctive way, with items posted to the knowledge base, blog, or forum interchangeably.
Additionally, they were finalizing a Strategic Plan that put greater emphasis on recruitment, and wanted a website that also served an external audience – new recruits.
Visit online:
ACS GEOC Before
ACS Forums
ACS GEOC Homepage After
Squarespace
Expanding Squarespace
Squarespace is a visual editor with limited capacity for backend development (JS / CSS) so it took some creative problem solving to offer ACS GEOC a CMS-like experience. I wanted the site to be easy to use, but also functional, so that updates were centered around new "blog" posts that would then filter to various areas of the site depending on how they were tagged. This made it easy for them to post awards, events, and upcoming conferences without needing to maintain multiple pages of the site. I'm very proud of the work I did to create a functional news archive, something that would be quite easy on Wordpress, but took a lot of extra work on Squarespace.
Organizing the archives of the Division's forum into clear and distinct areas greatly helped determined how the site should be structured, as well as keeping maintenance easy. These items form the backbone of content for the website and make sure various pages look up to date, even if the page itself hasn't been updated in some time.
To see how these news items populate a specific page on the site, check out Meetings and Events.
