First, we started brainstorming ideas for topics. The topics included all kinds of engineering issues, management issues, IEEE sources, people/HR issues, etc. This took several months to compile a comprehensive list.
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At the right you can see the images of the result of this brainstorming. We wrote two pages of ideas.
Both the
front and the back
pages of this brainstorming are available.
We gladly share this information with you in hopes that it will help you with your organization's web site.
If you find this information useful, please let us know.
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Second, we started working with the IEEE web site templates.
We then found a web site on line that had a layout similar to what we wanted in our web site. Specifically, we wanted a place at the top of each page for a banner, and we wanted a left-hand side menu of topics (similar to the site for the IEEE Twin Cities Engineering Management Chapter).
We next started to draft a left-hand side menu. By drafting this menu, we grouped and categorized the brainstorming ideas into logical sections. Themes appeared, and we developed a list of potential users and stakeholders of this web site (for an explanation of membership options, see Organization page):
We combined the layout from several web sites and added that to our top IEEE banner and menu. The html for the menu is a simple text list of topics and links. We create the html for the menu by processing the text file through a simple custom perl script. We generated this menu once for all the web pages on this site, then copied the html into each file. This is a simple process, the advanatge of which is that it requires no special tools or software, but it makes maintaining and updating the menu a little cumbersome.
In mid 2006, we ported our pages to the newer
IEEE web template
that we use here.
This template matches the look and feel of the new IEEE web site.
You can see what the older template looked like in this
example of our Publications page in the old format
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All of our html pages are 100% hand coded.
It is still a little combersome for us to update and enhance the left menu, so we are now looking for open source Linux and win tools to help with the webmaster page administration tasks.
At the beginning of 2009, we created a template file and wrote a Perl script to populate the html pages
from the template and the input source. We also created a makefile to build the output. This has greatly
increased the efficiency of updating pages.
We then easily completed converting all of the Engineering Management Society references to the new
Technology Management Council.
Membership 
