Spotlight on Innovative Research Earns SARE.org Top ACE Award
Today, cutting-edge sustainable agriculture research results are more accessible than ever, thanks to the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program's new suite of websites, which was recently awarded a top honor by the Association for Communications Excellence in Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Life and Human Sciences (ACE).
"This is a very effective, beautifully designed set of sites," commented ACE judge Lorna Olsen, of North Dakota State University. "The content is easily searchable and discoverable, and the navigation is intuitive and user-friendly." SARE.org received ACE's Gold Award for website design plus the Outstanding Professional Skill award for the entire information technology category.
Says SARE Director Robert Hedberg, "SARE.org is a comprehensive learning tool that helps advance sustainable innovations to the whole of American agriculture. Five thousand SARE-funded projects are searchable by topic, project number, grantee name, region, and state."
Users can also browse free books, bulletins, fact sheets, grantee-produced resources and videos spotlighting SARE-funded research. From the Field profiles invite producers, agricultural professionals, and other users to learn from grantees who have put their innovative ideas to the test.
The web project was an all-hands-on-deck effort with SARE's regional and national staff working collaboratively over three years to create five independent sites with common coding that allows information sharing among sites and ease of navigation. Contractor ThinkCreative of Tallahassee, Fla., built the site on the eZ Publish platform, helping to make the shared webplex vision a reality.
