A Brand New ForumOne.com

We're proud to announce a brand new ForumOne.com.

Redesigning our own site was a high priority for us this year. We refreshed the design this past summer, but it was clear that more substantial rework was needed. The old site was last redesigned in 2005, and it was showing its age, both visually and functionally.

As with any of our projects, we began by thinking hard about our audiences — primarily prospects, clients, and job seekers. We created audience personas for each, carefully considering what communications managers, program managers, technology managers, CEOs, and other key audiences might want from our site.

This led to a vastly improved information architecture and a number of great new features:

• Our Work: We now offer a much more flexible and interesting way to learn about the impressive sites and strategies we've developed over the past few years.
• Services: This site section provides a clear menu breakdown of our specialties and expertise — some of the most common ways we help our clients achieve their missions. Throughout the site, users are invited to explore our service offerings to discover how Forum One can help them.
• Meet Our Team: We often say that "our staff is our secret weapon." Our old site kept them a little too secret and primarily listed leadership. Now, every member of our team has his or her own profile. We had some fun writing them. We knew our team was talented, but we did not know, for example, that we had not one, but two former child actors in our midst!
• Events: We maintain a list of upcoming industry events that we sponsor or attend. For example, we offer three years' worth of Web Executive Seminars with presentation slides and audio from industry leaders.

We also made a number of improvements that will improve site management and user experience:

• Drupal: Our old site and blogs were powered by open source platforms that had lost momentum. Thus, as with most of our latest web site development projects, our new site is powered by the popular Drupal content management system. Drupal is constantly improving and innovating new modules through contributions from the global community of developers.
• Full Blog Integration: Our blog posts used to be published to independent platforms. They had no relationship with our flagship site or each other. Now, Forum One's Influence, User Experience & Design, and Technology blogs are united in Drupal. This makes management easier for us, and content discovery easier for our visitors. For instance, blog posts now automatically appear under the staff biography of the author.
• Improved Visual Design: Our long-time design partners Gravitate Design Studio and SquaredEye gave us an attractive new look. We worked with Gravitate to develop an updated set of corporate brand guidelines. SquaredEye then used these guidelines to create a full creative vision for our new site.
• Social Network Hooks: Links to all of our social content, including over 3,000 Delicious bookmarks and over 60 Slideshare presentations, are available in the footer of every page.

As a consulting company, obviously a primary goal of our redesign is to attract new or returning customers. Our daily work also involves sharing industry perspectives and tips through our blogs, tweets, and presentations. We've substantially improved our ability to deliver content to our clients, friends, and partners with this new site. We hope you will find it a valuable resource.

Credits:

Special thanks to the core team who produced the site: Sophie Burns, Andrew Cohen, Chris Hall, Tory Colvin, Colleen Gray, William Hurley, Corey Lafferty, Sandy Smith, and Brian Verhoeven.

Additional testing, content support, and cheerleading were provided by Barbara Bianco, Jim Cashel, Courtney Clark, Michaela Hackner, Matt Humphrey, Aimee McLaughlin, Joe Pringle, Tim Shaw, Kerry Thell, Kurt Voelker, and Chris Wolz.

Special thanks to our site's writer and editor, Paula Tarnapol Whitacre of Full Circle Communications.