Website

We have been working on this for the past two months, rethinking the architecture of the site, working on a redesign with the help of Greg from Label, Promise communities, Bread and butter and Kaspar our webmaster, editing and creating texts for the new pages that were added. Here comes the third version of our website :)

The idea was to have our landing page emphasize more the content we produce, and the fact that we now run multiple events in parallel. An effort was also made to simplify navigation across the different organizations that compose our little group.

The design has been simplified and streamlined, and we hope the new colors will allow you to easily navigate the content.

Take a bit of time to surf the site, and give us your feedback. We hope you enjoy it :)

We are currently redesigning the Lift landing page and would love to get some feedback from the screen designers and information architects among you!

We want the new Lift landing page to

• focus more on content and improve community- and social media features
• enable you to comment and share stories immediately from the landing page
• include a community heartbeat highlighting the most commented stories and new community members
• make the landing page multi-event, as we have already confirmed the hosting of 4 conferences in 2011 !

Please have a look at the mock-up, it shows you the all elements we need to integrate, and let us know your thoughts, thanks!

We received several requests for a page where you can see for which workshops you are registered, and we released that feature today. Login, go to the Lift10 workshops page, and click on the "» See for which workshops you already have signed up" link.

Beside team communications, this blog features posts written by community members. If you have a Lift account you can also share your thoughts and ideas by clicking here. Here is a post about UXconference, a conference organized by Lifters Diana Malerba and Luca Mascaro in Lugano later this year.

I am writing to present you UXconference, a user experience conference we are organizing in Lugano, Switzerland. The conference is about innovation and new ideas in user experience strategy, mobile site and application design, playful ux and agile design.

Starting on December 3, we want to create a first "Swiss" appointment to talk about innovation and to let people meet and know each other and generate new ideas, to contribute to the future user experience.

We believe in people, in innovation, in experiences. What about you?

See you at UXconference! Check the programme, speakers and register!

Thanks to your feedback and ideas we made several improvements to our website:

Share / Save

At the bottom of each page you will now find a button that allows you to:
• share and save the page on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Delicious, etc
• email the page to someone
• bookmark the page

Personal information tab now the default tab

We received several complaints about the fact that, when you want to edit your Lift account, you don't go straight to the personal information tab. This is fixed, you will now be taken to the right place.

Participants demographics

We all want to know who is coming to the conferences, both in personal and in general term. We added personal profiles and participants lists two years ago and this part is doing fine. For general information, we would like to be able to display:
• in what sector participants are working
• what kind of job they do

This information means a better understanding of the Lift audience, and it will be displayed at the top of the participants page (like we did for Lift France).

We need you to fill these new fields in your profile if you haven't already!

Need anything?

If you have ideas or requests for the liftconference.com website, please don't hesitate to send them to us using the feedback form!

The Lift website is constantly evolving and here is another nice new feature: improved community search! Use the form below - also accessible via the search box available on the top right of each page - to find anything you want about other members of the Lift community.

Want to see who comes from Italy? Who works for Swisscom? Who is interested in "social networks" or scifi? It is all available via the same form.

As Lift gets more visibility a bit more spam shows up. We had an abusive blog post for gold farmers, get automated spam via most of the site forms, and this morning some of you received unsolicited emails from a company called World Television.

I quickly contacted them and this should now have stopped. We will investigate what happened and raise the security in the future. Sorry for the inconvenience and please let us know about spam you might get via Lift so we can remove it.

Update: I forgot to mention there is of course no way to contact all lift participants in one email. The way the previous mailing worked was that, from the participants list, the names were grabbed by an intern who used Google to find emails. So we can't do anything except make the sender realize this is completely unproductive. In between I received a formal apology from World Television.

Our webmaster Kaspar has been working his magic on this site to bring you some new features. He just rolled out two nice improvements:

See which of your buddies are coming to the next conference

There is now a small blue sticker on the profile picture of buddies who will attend Lift09. This is what I see on my account:

Improved search results

Some icons have been added in the search results to help you identify the type of content returned. This is what a search on bruce sterling presentation will return. Notice the nice little icons telling you "this is a video" or "this is a blog post".

Have some ideas on how to improve this site? Contact John Elbing and attend the What can we make of the Lift Community for the other 362 days? workshop!

We have partnered with Mobify.Me to bring you a mobile version of our website. Point your browser to m.liftconference.com and you will see a site optimized for iPhone, but also Blackberry, Android and Sony Ericsson!

As the wifi traditionally fails miserably during every single conference happening on this planet, this will allow you to connect to our site and get the most important information regardless of the situation.

As the new poster goes to print we decided to find a new tag line to define what Lift is, and what it does for us. After an intense brainstorm - and a lot of help from our friend Michèle Laird who is a constant source of inspiration for anything related to letters and words - we came up with:

Lift, inspiring and connecting pioneers since 2006

To quote one of the exchanges we had while working on this: "the tone is simple, catchy, discreet, action-driven in a non-pushy way; It is inclusive, makes people feel good, and emphasizes continuing innovation over a specific domain of competence. It also leaves the Lift format open for evolution".

The "since 2006" is a little bit of a joke, putting in perspective how those technologies that seem to have been here forever (remember life without email?) are in fact still very new.

I hope you like it. If not you will have to wait next year to see it go away, it's being printed as we speak ;D