The Colin Powell Leadership Development Conference was targeting corporate executives across the the US and Canada.  The web site had to be professional, to-the-point, and easy for busy executive or their assistants to gather information and register.  Web architect Randy Carey drove this project and built the event/registration site through his role as director of information strategies.

Objective:  Automate the registration process and make it intuitive so that more people will register online.  Previous pain: In previous years this Leadership Conference received over half of its registrations by mail - requiring significant time and money to process manually.  Result:  Over 98% of registrations were submitted and processed online, processing well over two million dollars within a three month window.  That year's conference set its all-time attendance record -- one that persists to this day.

Article reprint on the architecting of this conference and registration site.

task-based navigation

Carey recognized that potential attendees would visit the site at different phases:  those considering the event, those wishing to register, and those who have registered and are preparing for the conference.  So he segmented the navigation into each of these three phases.

Note that each line is distinguished by its own color and is qualified by action text: "Tell me more," "I'm ready," and "Help me prepare."  As a result, site visitors could zero in on the options relevant to where they were in the decision and registration process.

the "online planner"

Attendees were required to register for workshops when they registered for their conference.  One challenge was to provide an web-based planning tool that would help attendees choose the right set of sessions based upon [a] their leadership training objectives and [b] their executive level within their own company.

This challenge was accomplished by the interactive web-based tool shown in this screen shot.  Carey developed the concept and built the tool.