Hello, all you members and guests and visitors! I’m happy to report that, so far, the changes I made to the site are coming along smoothly and we should see some improvements in the way everything looks and feels. Just to let you know, there were many reasons to abandon the old format. However, I’ll just tick off three main reasons that changes needed to be made.
First, the second version of the site (the one I originally made to replace the first version) was built when I was still learning all about HTML code. At that stage, I naively thought that frames were the best way to go for making information accessible. Well, I was right… from a user’s point of view! The problem was that the information wasn’t accessible from the World Wide Web’s perspective. Nothing could be mapped on a search engine, and the site only gave vague clues to search engines as to what it was about. Second, updates to the site could only be done by rewriting the code for each page to be changed, and then use a FTP program to upload those files to replace the old ones on the server. Even the most hard-core programmer will tell you they’d rather not mess around with code unless they absolutely have to! Well, now the technology exists where we don’t have to do as much coding; just writing in a text field (like I’m doing now!) and hitting the magic “Publish” button is 90% of the work here! Third, some of the pages, like the Club Articles section, would most benefit from having a blog-oriented organization. Information needs to be easily found by all members… not hinted at on the front page, requiring the visitor to dig! I felt the ASCS would most benefit from having the information it needs to display front and center, accessible either through one or two clicks, or through a quick-search. These reasons gave incentive to make some sweeping changes for the better.
Now, my personal blog is run on the WordPress platform, which is a very powerful, customizable, easy-to-use publishing program entirely run on the server space I rent out for my site. My site’s front-end page is the portal to my blog, photo gallery, video gallery and scads of other pages. However, the blog contains, and links to, the main meat of everything about my life. I thought “If WordPress could do that for me, and others have run entire sites off of it, then what can it do for the club?!” Hence, the reason for the platform switch! If I should ever leave the club for any reason, I want the succeeding administrator to have a low learning curve, if need be.
Now that I gave the introduction, how about a brief walkthrough? I’ll try to include thoughts on future additions, without making too many promises, of course! Let’s start with the horizontal navigation bar, underneath the ASCS site banner. No one needs me to explain what the “Home” button does, right? The “About” button takes you to the info page about the club. Nothing too fancy. The “Photo Gallery” button takes you to all the club’s, and member’s, photos. I still need a way for members to post their own photos on this, since the ZenPhoto webapp only allows for one admin sign-on… Any suggestions here would be greatly appreciated. The “Club Articles” section was a pain to put together; it may not look like much, but it required mucking around in lots of PHP code to get it to automate itself the way I wanted it to. Hopefully, it will serve the club well! The “ASCS Forum” is the place for all members to go to for reading and posting announcements, want-ads, advice and anything else they want the club members to know. If you’ve never been a member of a forum before, try this one and you’ll soon get the hang of it all. The “Archives” page is where you’ll find all the old postings by month, category or author. Any postings on Upcoming Events will not show by author, since those are tucked away in their own special niche on the site, as I’ll explain in a bit. “Links” will be finished in a week or two, and that will hold all the club affiliations with businesses and other clubs.
Now on to the Sidebar, the smaller right-hand side of the pages. From the top, we have a cute, nifty “Search” field. Now, my main problem with the WordPress program was that it treats what they call “Pages” somewhat differently than regular “Posts”. I wanted to make any Club Articles, like the one you’re currently reading, different than regular “Post” updates and general club info. However, if I made Articles as “Pages”, the Search field ignores Pages, and we wouldn’t want that. So I modified the page code so that any posts written as Club Articles would be tucked away from the regular posts and have their own spot in the site, yet still be searchable. Just try a search, like typing in “Spazy”, and click Search, and you’ll find out what Cliff’s bird has been doing lately in his articles! Next we have the Events Calendar and Events List. Both work together to alert our members and guests to what we have going on. Click on any of the events to see them in detail!
The “Meta” section of the Sidebar is mainly for those who have a login for contributing, editing or administrating the site, but there is one thing on there that’s very useful to our members. If your computer has a browser that is capable of displaying RSS feeds, you can click on the RSS link in “Meta” and subscribe to this site’s feed. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and what it does is let your browser notify you when there’s been any updates to this site. Nifty, eh? As of this writing, Safari and Firefox are the best browsers for RSS feed updates, but there are add-ons available for other browsers that give them the capability as well. I encourage everyone to do some research, as this is a great capability to have.
Well, I’ve just about spewed everything I have to say about the new site format and everything it entails. As of this writing, I still have to expand on the Links section and unify the ASCS Forum interface with the main site (white is such a contrast to tans/greys/browns!). But right now, I think things are good to go! As usual, let me know if anyone has any suggestions. I’m here to listen and consider!
Cheers!
Christopher Walls
