Ascedia Launches New Website for Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC) - Wins Three National Awards

WEAC’s recently launched website won three awards at the 2009 State Education Editors (SEE) Conference. The annual conference is a gathering of editors and designers from the National Education Association (NEA) and NEA state affiliates throughout the country. The new website won the awards for Most Improved Website, Best Website – Large States, and Best of Show. The website was designed and developed by Ascedia, a Milwaukee based web development company.

The old WEAC site needed consolidation, structure, up to date standards, and a common content management system (CMS) that would allow the administrators to move forward with a robust workflow engine to maintain the organization of the new site. Some of the other key features included in the new site were: forums, blogs, news, RSS feeds, video library and a photo gallery. These new features are maintained by administrators in multiple departments and, due to the permission based member login on the front end of the site, the modules are further organized by user login types. More than 6,500 pages from the old website were rolled into the newly redesigned site. The large-scale project included a fresh new design platform and a fully integrated CMS.  The new CMS now allows WEAC to efficiently maintain and organize all of the content and copy on the new site as well as social media tools that are becoming crucial to communicating with the organization’s large user-base of over 98,000 members.
 
Ascedia has been developing interactive solutions for a wide variety of businesses, including travel and hospitality, healthcare and medical services, manufacturing, non-profit, and retail businesses since September 2000. Ascedia’s clients are located across the U.S., but many of them are in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, and Chicago, Illinois. From creating and hosting websites to programming complicated e-commerce systems, Ascedia works with clients to create solutions that help them accomplish their goals. Ascedia’s staff is composed of 30 full-time professionals dedicated to website design, web programming, and internet marketing.

The Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC) represents the public policy, labor and professional interests of education professionals in Wisconsin.  Its mission is to promote respect and support for quality public education and to provide for the professional and personal growth and economic welfare of members.

The State Education Editors (SEE) group is comprised of communications professionals who work in the state affiliates of the National Education Association and at the NEA. There are more than 135 members nationwide, and they work as editors, graphic designers, webmasters, writers and public relations professionals. Through printed and electronic media, SEE members communicate the importance of quality public education and association membership to teachers, education support professionals, parents, politicians and community members.