[Cialug] Web Work, Volunteering

[Claus]

Todd Walton wrote:
> Anybody here ever do voluntary web work?  Sometime in the coming month
> or two I'm going to start working on a local user group's web site on
> a volunteer basis.  I've been assured that it will consist mostly of
> "take next meeting date, post to website", but that I will be given
> room to improve the site if I can.  I'm not a web programmer, and as
> you can see from my other Web Work email, I'm not even very good at
> HTML.  But I'm a geek and I have lots of kind-of-experience.  I can
> figure stuff out.
> 
> Anybody have any stories of doing this kind of thing?
> 

Todd,

I'm slow to respond as usual.  The Volunteer Center of Story County 
(www.vcstory.org) is using Google Pages which allows office staff to 
maintain the website themselves.  It surprisingly worked out well so far 
even though I really wish there was a way to keep a uniform header. 
Google is transferring the service sometime to Google Sites so things 
might need to change a bit.

The Society of Women's Engineers (www.heartofiowaswe.org) is using a 
custom website that I helped to create many winters ago.  It's php 
driven and has an administrative interface that allows updating of the 
meetings, events, newsletters, and minutes without the need to edit any 
page at all. It's modeled pretty much like my personal website interface 
which I described here 
http://nis.niesens.com/behind-the-scenes/niesens-behind-the-scenes.html
Nothing pretty but it's simple and works.

The whole goal is to enable the organization to keep their data up to 
date themselves.  Any additional layer makes the process slower and less 
likely to be up to date.

If you are going to update the website for the user group on an ongoing 
basis then you might as well join the group and actively participate. 
That's pretty much what's needed in order to make such a support model work.

Claus