501(c)3 Private Nonprofit Business Organization
The client
FORCE11 (The Future of Research Communication and eScholarship) is a global community working on how scholarship is created and shared. FSCI, launched in 2017, is the institute that turns that community into a teaching week.
Courses run from orientation to advanced topics by discipline. Participants are researchers, scholars, librarians, publishers, funders, and research administrators. They leave with more than a syllabus: ideas, tools, and tactics they can take back to their labs and libraries.
The institute changes every year. The website has to stay recognizable as FSCI while each cohort gets its own dates, location, and course list.
The challenge
FSCI needed a public home that was not a one-off flyer for a single summer.
The 2017 institute already had a landing page that worked. The next version had to:
- Feel like that page—without the year hard-coded into the identity.
- Use fewer menus and clearer paths to Events, About, and FORCE11.
- Put resources (articles, photos, slides) where people would actually find them.
- Give each summer its own event page (dates, place, a way back to FSCI and FORCE11)
- Let staff edit the page directly, instead of fighting a social embed for basic updates.
- Show leadership how the site was used, not only how it looked.
Scholarly audiences scan. If the path from “What is FSCI?” to “This year’s institute” to “Resources I can reuse” is muddy, the week’s value never leaves the room.
What we did
A durable FSCI portal
FSCI needed a standing public face that could outlast any single cohort. We designed a durable institute portal: recognizable as FSCI year after year, tied to the host campus and to FORCE11, with room for each summer’s event to live as its own destination—dates, place, and a way back into the larger program. Resources (articles, images, slides) sit in the main journey so the week’s teaching does not disappear when the cohort goes home.
FSCI needed a standing public face that could outlast any single cohort. We designed a durable institute portal: recognizable as FSCI year after year, tied to the host campus and to FORCE11, with room for each summer’s event to live as its own destination—dates, place, and a way back into the larger program. Resources (articles, images, slides) sit in the main journey so the week’s teaching does not disappear when the cohort goes home.
Layout that matches how people read
Information architecture came first—clear paths for participants and organizers. Visual hierarchy keeps the academic story in the body of the page and the atmosphere in the frame, so registration and courses stay easy to find.
Information architecture came first—clear paths for participants and organizers. Visual hierarchy keeps the academic story in the body of the page and the atmosphere in the frame, so registration and courses stay easy to find.
A site staff can run
Organizers can update the institute pages directly. Google Analytics and a comparison report gave them a before-and-after view of how people actually used the site.
Organizers can update the institute pages directly. Google Analytics and a comparison report gave them a before-and-after view of how people actually used the site.
The result
FSCI stopped living as a dated 2017 snapshot. The institute has a standing front door, each year can have its own event page, resources are part of the main journey, and the team can update copy and measure use without waiting on a developer for every announcement.
Services
Institute landing page · Event microsites (FSCI 2017 / 2018) · Information architecture · Resource library structure · CMS editing for staff · Visual layout and brand-consistent color · Google Analytics and reporting.