Case studies We learn so little and forget so much.
Case 10 - Continued - Small nonprofit site issues - what we finally did October 31, 2001
We are making some headway now. Nonprofits are under funded and staff are certainly busy but now that several big summer events are complete, we have time to think about the website again.
To bring you up to date
We met in June to discuss the website and how to manage the content.
I used FrontPage to doaredesign based on a very good ALS website. Thanks to The Keith Worthington Chapter of ALS for our basic design. They've changed their design now but it used to look somewhat like ours.
I copied the existing content into the new design.
You can't expect even experienced surfers to visit frequently in order to see if there is anything new.
Just about everyone reads their e-mail though.
At the very least you need e-mail to notify folks that you've updated your site.
It's better still to send your updates via e-mail as well as update your site.
We've used the time since to do some more thinking.
We've been too busy to take the next steps until now.
Getting the new site published:
All of you wise folks know that we perform one FTP session and we're done. Wise folks also know that it's never that easy.
The staff in not familiar with the new site, so they have to figure out how to update it.
They were using a very old version, FrontPage 95, to manage the site. That's fine, but you can't get training on "95" anymore and new versions are, well, better.
They have made some website changes since I built the test site.
They've been in the habit of adding new menu items for each new event. So, they're menu gets bigger all of the time and old events stay on the menu.
They've been using a FrontPage feature with an include and have a process that they understand to add a new pages and menu items.
I don't understand those FrontPage processes and I also wanted to make a site that didn't depend on FrontPage extensions. The support person at the company that hosts the site for free didn't like them either.
I went with the philosophy that the menu items would remain fixed, that new events would be listed on the "Event" page that had links to all the old and new events.
Now, I have to teach them the new process and hope they understand and like it.
One of the staff's requirements is that several folks be able to update the page.
Eons ago when they first published the site, the tech folks (now long gone) used the webserver as the FrontPage file server. That is, when the open a site from FrontPage, it downloaded from the webserver. When they did a save, it saved to the webserver.
Thus there was no local copy of the website. It took a long time for FrontPage to open or save a page.
Worse, a mistake could wipe out all or part of the website.
No obvious FTP was involved.
The host company's support folks, who support FTP very well, aren't as anxious to support the FrontPage features.
The value of an e-mail list is taking some time to take root.
The "Plan"
I had a plan for completing the project:
Install the new site on their PC and let them get used to it for a while.
Publish the site along side the existing site and letting them get used to it for a while.
And, when the time was right, replace the existing site with the new site.
Help them until they were comfortable and on their own.