Status: Ended
TRAIN Conference has ceased operating.
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The TRAIN Conference asked me to create their second-ever website for their 2001 conference (their first-ever website for their 2000 conference had been an unmitigated disaster), so I became a volunteer and used the opportunity to further my technical reportoire.
Each year, their graphic designer (chiefly responsible for designing print materials) would furnish me with their digital works and I’d incorporate them – including style and graphic elements – into the website.
These websites are the final versions for each year, published after each conference had ended. I’ve made minor changes to them in order to showcase them in this portfolio (okay, I fixed a couple of typos, too!) but they are otherwise as they originally were. They’re highly primitive in appearance and implementation by today’s standards (e.g. tables were initially used for layout), but they complied with the standards & best practices of the day and demonstrate how my skills improved & my experience increased year after year. Many of the linked third-party websites have passed away over time.
This was my first TRAIN Conference website. These are the design goals that I set for myself (I still aim for these goals today):
This was my second website for them and is the forerunner for the later versions. By this time, I’d had some time to contemplate improvements. Their graphics designer had created new logos, too.
Other than a new colour scheme, not much changed between this year’s website and last year’s.
By this time, web browsers had much broader support for Cascading Style Sheets so this year’s website was a rebuild that embraced them wholeheartedly.
Furthermore, the TRAIN Conference were so impressed by my dedication and quality of work over the past few years that they asked me to be part of the committee.
This website sports a new colour scheme (as usual) and a few enhancements over the previous year’s.
This year, another organization scheduled a conference for the same weekend that we were scheduled for, so we tried to collaborate a bit with each other.
The website is becoming a mature & stable product at this point and there were few technical improvements.
We pulled the plug on NetConnect because it never caught on. I think, over its four-year lifespan, only one person ever posted anything in it – and that was one of the TRAIN Conference committee members.
Again, there were few technical improvements compared to the previous year’s website.
This was TRAIN Conference’s final year.
Some of these programs are obsolete now and I use newer programs to perform the same tasks.
TRAIN Conference started in 1983 after a group of interdenominational Christian Education directors (who’d been meeting monthly for coffee, fellowship & support) determined that their respective teams of volunteers would benefit from the same training. After some deliberation, the first TRAIN Conference was held in November of 1983 with 250 attendees – exceeding everyone’s expectations.
TRAIN Conferences were held annually on the first weekend of November for many years after that. The goal had always been to provide high-quality, informative seminars at affordable rates, so it ran as an (unregistered) non-profit with volunteers. As the new millenium was starting and the Internet was becoming more available to home users, other conferences (which operated more like businesses) began to emerge and saturate the market. TRAIN Conference couldn’t compete with their larger budgets and couldn’t attract the same attendance as it used to. The writing was on the wall even before the 2007 conference had started, so the decision was made to bring things to a conclusion shortly thereafter.