Website

In the months leading up to your event, its website is all that exists of it for most people.

Anything you want anyone to know should be on there; you can be certain that if it’s not they will be asking you about it by email. In fact, even if it is on the website many people will ask you anyway.

Put yourself in the position of a first-time visitor to your country who barely speaks the language and is a very inexperienced traveller.

If your website doesn’t at least guide them towards the information they need, many will not even consider attending.

What to publish when

As soon as possible, the website should contain information about:

This will allow people to make their basic plans.

Next most urgent are:

You should also publish your Code of Conduct.

These are the things that will allow people to commit themselves to the event.

The next most urgent thing to publish is travel advice.

In due course you will want to publish information about your call for proposals, and later, your programme of talks and other events.

If there are aspects of the conference that are particularly important to you (your diversity and accessibility initiatives for example), mention these at appropriate intervals. They may be important, but they’re less urgent than information about venues.

Structure

The more you publish, the more it matters that you organise it in a comprehensible structure. Beware of publishing too much information; just because you want people to know about something doesn’t mean that they care or will even read it.

Worse, the more content on the site the more that will not be read, and this will sometimes be at the expense of important information.

Responsive design

Especially during the event, more people than usual will be consulting it using mobile devices. Your site needs to have a responsive design so that it’s easily readable on a phone.