Creating a Conference Website

The ACMA has a permanent web presence at https://computermusic.org.au

Each year's ACMC organisers are responsible for creating their own conference website which is used for communicating submission information, the conference schedule and proceedings.

Creating a website doesn't have to be terribly difficult or expensive (as little as 12AUD to just buy a domain name). Here's some options and examples.

1. Jekyll and Github Pages.

The lowest cost way to do this is to create a website with Jekyll and Github Pages.

The idea is that you write the website content (mostly) in Markdown and use a Jekyll theme to provide a format and layout for most of the pages. This is not terribly hard to figure out and the ACMCA committee members can provide some help getting started.

When you create a website this way, the hosting is free (provided by https://github.com), but you need to buy a domain name separately. E.g., the ACMC organisers can purchase a domain name for that year's conference (e.g., https://acmc2020.com).

You can also use other static site generators, e.g., Hugo, which will have a similar process.

2. MiniConf annd Github Pages

In 2020, we hosted the conference website using a system called "MiniConf": https://github.com/Mini-Conf/Mini-Conf

(You can still see the website here: https://acmc2020.com).

This is similar to the Jekyll / Github Pages option above, but required a bit more coding (in Python) to get it to work properly. The advantage with miniconf was the ability to display information about each presenter / paper / performance and with a very clear interface: https://acmc2020.com/papers.html?filter=keywords

3. Wordpress

Using a wordpress account is a good way to spin up a wordpress site quickly (https://wordpress.com/. The minimum cost is about 60AUD for a year of service (this includes a domain name).

Using wordpress won't let you make a nice interface for a schedule or individual papers as in the above options, but if you just want to have nicely set up pages quickly, it's a decent optionn.

You can run into trouble at the end of this year as it's a bit tricky to export a wordpress site for archive.

After the conference

We'd like to be able to archive old conference websites for posterity. With 1 and 2 above, this is pretty easy (we just move the conference git repository to our ACMA organisation account). Option 3 makes this a bit harder, but still good to remember to do it.

We don't suggest that conference organisers pay for a domain name / hosting forever, better to just keep the domain as a temporary address for 1-2 years.