NCUWM Registration Site
The Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics is a high-profile annual national conference hosted at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. The conference, which has run since 1999, draws outstanding undergraduate women mathematicians to meet other women who share their interest in the mathematical sciences.
This site collects participant information including including travel plans, lodging needs, and requests to present papers or posters. For most participants this site will be their main interaction with the conference organization until they arrive in Lincoln.
The site was developed from the site specification document on webskate101 in August and September 2009. There is a demonstration server running on webskate 101.com, and the live site runs at the UNL Math Department.
Design Considerations
Site users
The site meets the needs to two groups of users: student registrants at the conference, and the conference support staff. Students provide information about their evolving travel plans and to select preferences for the conference. The support staff gather information from the administrative section of the site.
For many of the students users, this conference is the first professional meeting which they have attended. That makes it particularly important that the registration site address all requests, support easy updates of information, and keep the student informed about her progress through the registration process. The main landing page has a prominent "To-Do List" which reminds participants of te remaining parts of the site to be visited. Students receive emails on passing milestones in the registration process.
E-Commerce
The conference collects a registration fee, and the registration site includes integration with PayPal Website Payments.
Institutional Look & Feel
The site integrates with the University of Nebraska - Lincoln web standards, including use of standardized page layouts.
Technologies
The site is designed using the standard LAMP software stack. It uses plain PHP instead of a more heavyweight web-framework, and is designed around an ad-hoc MVC pattern. All requests are handled by a dispatcher at http://host/index.php. The dispatcher calls a business routine for the appropriate request, which in turn calls the rendering code for the requested page. Details are in the Architecture section of the site specification.