program guide

[donastraya.livejournal.com]

I think it might be too early to ask, but has anyone seen a daily program/panel guide? i.e what time what panel is scheduled for

Comments

[joreth]

Thanks for the links! That helps.

As a community organizer myself, I'm pretty familiar with how difficult it can be to get the schedules up and available, but in my own communities, we make it front-page news on the website and have a link directly to "schedules" on every page header and we have a Twitter feed that we update with scheduling information (that also uses a widget on the homepage for those who don't follow Twitter directly). We also have a LJ page, where the info is copied, but it also links directly to the website, so although there are multiple sources of information, all the sources lead back to the main website and the front page of the main website. We have never had anyone ask us where to find the schedule or when it will be up because that information is the easiest information to find.

As a con-goer, I appreciate all the effort put into making D*C a fantastic event - I wouldn't miss it for anything. But from one con organizer to another, a suggestion would be to make the schedule information less of a hunt than it currently is.

[docrailgun.livejournal.com]

I don't know... this is my 8th Dragoncon, and I've never had a problem finding either the program or individual track schedules once they're posted.

[joreth]

Well I know I'm not the only person who looked around the website right up until the con started and could not find the schedule easily, as several of my friends had the same problem.

There's also the qualifying phrase "once they're posted". As I said, I found the schedule last year by doing a Google search and having it direct me to the LJ, less than a week before con (because I had been keeping an eye on the website prior to that). I went to check the website after that and still no schedule. I don't doubt that it could have been posted after I stopped looking for it, once I found it in LJ.

And some of the tracks do post their schedules, but not all of them, particularly the tracks I happened to be interested in.

The schedule links are currently found under the "Public/Media Relations", which is not intuitively obvious to newcomers that this is the place to find a schedule. One has to either start clicking randomly to find it or click methodically down the list to find it, which can take time and, for the internet generation attention span, some people lose interest before they ever get there.

A simple link on the home page that says "schedules", somewhere near the top, preferably in the headerbar, would take a lot of the guesswork out of the process, and an announcement about when to expect the schedule would also prevent people from asking constantly "is it there yet? is it there yet?"

Keep in mind that this is your 8th year, so you should be pretty familiar by now with the website and how it works, but newcomers, people with fewer years experience, and people who don't remember where they found it last year might have more trouble navigating the site.