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Help ban landmines - time to volunteer for a good cause?

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Help ban landmines - time to volunteer for a good cause?
Hello all,

I'm "spamming" this document to a couple of places and forums I use and know some good people frequent. Please feel free to forward to anyone you think could be interested.

If you have other suggestions for places to post it I'd be happy to get a hint.

-kjell ICBL Website Design contest



Origin: Kjell Knudsen (webmaster@icbl.org) – Design a new layout for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and win great honour, wide exposure for your skills and a genuine ICBL baseball cap!



The International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) - is a network of more than 1.400 non-governmental organizations in 90 countries, working for a global ban on landmines. Together with its then coordinator, Jody Williams, the ICBL was awarded the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for its work leading to the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty. Since then the campaign has worked hard to universalise the treaty and to monitor its implementation.

One vital instrument in our work has been and will continue be to keep the public informed about our cause through our website at www.icbl.org. Today our website is one of the most frequently referenced and visited websites on the landmines issue (number 1 when searching for “landmines” with Google). Much of the success is probably due to frequent updates and providing important background information on the landmines issue.

Content has mostly taken priority over website appearance. After near four years with the same website design (since the site was launched in 1998) the time has come for a complete revamp of the site. We are looking to both modernize our look and get a more functional design. What’s in it for the designer

[/url]Due to our financial situation we cannot pay for design work with money. As we always run on a tight budget we try to get as much services as possible pro bono and hope this will be possible for this project as well.

Though we cannot provide financial compensation for work this project has many benefits for designers including:

  • You will receive proper credit for your work. All proposals that fulfill the basic requirements will be linked from a contest result page. The winning designer’s own homepage will be permanently linked from the ICBL front page, in addition to credits on all pages that use your design. This should give very good exposure for your work.
  • If you are not a very experienced designer you’ll get some real life (web) experience, but certainly, more experienced designers will be able to expand their skills as well!
  • If your website design is not considered for the www.icbl.org website we may still consider using your skills for one of our other webdesign projects.
  • If in the future we are in a position to hire a designer, designers we have collaborated with already would have preference.
  • In addition to all benefits we also offer:
    • An ICBL pin to all serious participants fulfilling the basic contest application requirements, and,
    • The winner will receive a cool ICBL baseball cap
Requirements

[/url]We are open about the visual look of the site but have some strict technical requirements to ensure the usefulness of the design.

Here are our basic requirements:

  • Download size/speed
    The design should take into account that the ICBL audience is a very wide one, including many users with slow connections. Slow loading design, or design requiring much to load before anything is shown is not possible for us.
  • Cascading Style Sheets
    Use CSS for all text formatting (the ICBL pages already use this a lot), possibly also for element positioning. No backup solution for design in non/bad CSS browsers required as long as the users will be able to view plain text and basic navigation.
  • Table aware
    If tables are used in the design it should be done in a way where the whole page is not within the same table, as this requires loading the whole page before anything displays.
  • XHTML 1.0 compatible
    The design should follow the XHTML 1.0 standard and validate at http://validator.w3.org/ under “XHTML 1.0 Strict” with no errors.
  • No new technologies on the front
    No designs requiring download of plugins to view the front will be considered. Javascript can be ok if it works in all major browsers (IE 5, Netscape 6/Mozilla and Opera 6) and you provide backups for incompatible or old browsers.


Some more important requirements, these can be avoided if for good reasons (please include with comments on your proposal):

  • No Frames
    For maintenance simplicity we have decided not to use frames in our next site design
  • Tableless design
    Preferably the design should follow the ideas laid out on this webpage:
    http://climbtothestars.org/coding/tableless/ . This means to create a design which heavily relies on definitions within a linked stylesheet, and possibly users with a browser that does not use CSS, or does so badly, will only see plain text. There should be provided basic links for such users but not necessarily the full menu system.
    The advantage with such design is download speed, as all design will be downloaded once for all pages through the stylesheet.
  • Header and footer inclusion
    It should be possible to implement the design through SSI or PHP file inclusion of one header file just after before heading within document and footer file just before and the connection to an external stylesheet.
What to design?

[/url]For us to get useful templates you should preferably give templates to be used for the following:

  • ICBL Frontpage
    Using elements from the ICBL front and menus, but not necessarily including all the current elements, and possibly including new ones. It should have one large space for displaying articles from the ICBL news tool with titles, summaries and a photo.
  • Section homepage
    Outlining a section page – eg http://www.icbl.org/info/ - possibly including submenus for this page/introduction
  • Single info page
    http://www.icbl.org/info/contacts.html
  • News article page
    http://www.icbl.org/news/2002/232.php


We do realize that it might not be so interesting to spend loads of time to design a full set of templates only to be rejected in the end. Hence if you can provide a convincing template for the frontpage, showing skills with the basic requirements, we would still consider your proposal. Please indicate if:

  • you are submitting a finished proposal or a draft (please submit only the final draft) which you would expect to develop further in cooperation with the ICBL.
  • you will be available to finish the work during December 2002.


While the main ICBL website is our priority we would also be happy for design proposals for the following sections of the site that have their own layout:

Other relevant information
  • [/url]Preferably submit you proposal as a URL to the pages posted on your own website.
  • If you don’t have your own webspace send the proposal as one zip/tar file including all relevant files for your proposal to webmaster@icbl.org .
  • Photos are important to present our cause, keeping in mind our size and download requirements you may use freely from our Image Library on the web in your design proposals: http://www.icbl.org/imagelibrary
  • If you have inputs on the site structure that would make for better templates/navigation we are open for this.
  • Many of our country campaigns are looking at having websites set up but lack the technical experience or don’t have anyone who could help them do this. The ICBL provides them with free space to host their websites but have no capacity to help out setting up their websites. If you could be interested in being part of our pool of volunteers to help campaigns setup and maintain simple websites please indicate so when submitting your proposal.
Deadline

[/url]Last date for submission of proposals is 20 November 2002. We will try to contact the winning proposals by 20 December 2002.

If you receive/see this message at a later date and could be interested in similar volunteer work please do contact us.

Contact

[/url]Any questions may be directed to:


Kjell Knudsen – ICBL Webmaster
webmaster@icbl.org
Tel: +47 22 03 77 20


Please feel free to forward this document to any other relevant recipients.