Overview - nucauldron/Northeastern-Cauldron-Yearbook GitHub Wiki

Welcome to the wiki for the cauldron yearbook's web development team. We are still in the beginning stages of the development, but there are a number of ventures that we plan on taking to improve school yearbooks as a whole. As of now our plans for the website are not limited to providing a digital face for our product, but also to expand the business entirely. We feel that there is more revenue to be made through advertising ventures as well as ways we can improve the experience for students.

Development Initiatives

The currently active website for the yearbook is nothing to sneeze at. The design itself is fairly concise and it has had many compliments on it's usability from buyers and staff alike. However, built on a custom made MVC Framework as opposed to CodeIgniter's highly developed one make's it much more difficult to add new features to. Not to mention that the design of the pages did not make full use of the MVC style of code.

Interactive Design

Another concept that the site is currently lacking is a means for constant updates. The site itself includes a management console from which staff can edit the page content, but this does not provide the interactive abilities that users crave in this day and age. With this in mind, we would like to implement a blog with this new refactoring. From this blog, we can post updates from the yearbook photography staff, development team, and much more. This will help humanize the staff behind the group as well as drag customers back to our website over and over again.

Advertising Platform

With this improved traffic, we can now move onto the last stage of the initiative. We would like to implement an entire advertising platform. We are not looking to simply place ads on our website, but to provide a means for service or product providers to sell their ads in multiple locations. The eventual concept would be to allow other schools to use our platform on their own sites. This would not only allow us to improve the statistics of this program, but also help us redefine the revenue stream for yearbooks entirely.

Employment Opportunities

One of the primary potential benefactors of this advertising scheme would likely be employers of all kinds. One thing that all college seniors (target market for yearbook sales) have in common is that they are all done with school! This means that the vast majority of them will be looking for jobs. What better way for a company to get the best and brightest recent graduates than to advertise in the one place they will all look. On top of this, students who are looking into the yearbook have graduation on the mind. This thought provokes further thinking into plans after graduation in almost all students, and this makes them very open to employment opportunities. What better place for employers to advertise than with a school yearbook!