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Lion CONTACT _Con-3F49C5301 \c \s \l Ted Rypma
Paradise & District Lions Club
District A-15
Cabinet Secretary for District A-15, and Webmaster and Technology Chair for Multiple District A.
Lion Ted has held all Club offices except Treasurer, and in the past has served the District as Cabinet Secretary, Zone Chair, Communications Chair, Information Technology Chair, and Webmaster. He has served the Multiple District as Technology Chair and as Webmaster for a number of years.
He has been a presenter at District Leadership Seminars for Secretaries and for Bulletin Editors, and has run several sessions for Lions on Using the Internet.
Lion Ted is a Software Engineer for a manufacturer of Internet Communications devices. He lives in Waterloo, Ontario with his wife, Sandy, and two dogs and enjoys the company of his two married children, their spouses and three grandchildren.
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So youve put all the effort into designing and creating a web site for your Club or District, and it seems to be doing what you want. Your Club has better information, your community knows all about your events, and prospective members can find what you are all about as Lions.
Now what? Here are some questions you should ask about how can you improve things:
How can I make sure the web site is easy to find?
How can I ensure that as we expand, my site provider allows us to grow?
How can I improve services to my Community and my Club or District without increasing cost?
What technical "under the hood" things can I do to improve access to the site?
What can I do to make maintaining the site easier?
Answering these questions to varying degrees will be the goal of this presentation. It will not be possible to go into great detail - there just is not enough time in a single session. But I will point you to areas of further research. The Internet provides a wealth of ideas and suggestions to expand on any ideas you get here, some complete with implementations. You need only search.
We will begin by suggesting some things that will make your site easier to find.
Most people look for things on the Web by using search engines such as Google and Yahoo! If these tools do not index the information on your site, no one will find it this way, and you will not likely see many visitors, and thus a return on your investment in time to build and maintain your site. Use the following tools to help search engines find your site:
Have a relevant title for each page (
tags - more on this later).
Make sure text on the page is relevant to your topic. Some repetition is good!
If you have many pictures, use alternate text descriptions ( tag - more on this later).
Ensure that text links are available to navigate to pages in your site, not just buttons or images.
Have community, District and Multiple District web sites link to your site. Return the favour.
Don't overdo links to outside web sites on every page of your site - keep them in one place.
Implement a sitemap, which will help your visitors and the search engines. (more on this later)
Look at your site with a text browser (such as Lynx) to evaluate search engine friendliness.
Use a robots.txt file to help guide the search engine spiders, or crawlers.
Consider submitting your site to the search engine companies (see their web sites).
Avoid using too many images to present information. Not only are web readers for the blind incapable of using images effectively, search engines cannot use them effectively to index the parts of your site. Text alternatives on the same page (on a header, footer or border) are a good idea.
You're ready to grow the size and complexity of your web site. Make sure you can!
A goal of every organization using a web site should be to improve the site over time. Not all the good ideas will come to you at once, and continual improvement, both in content and in maintainability, should be your target. You also want to be sure the hosting provider you choose allows you to do this. Following are some things to consider when choosing your site provider:
Do you have enough space to expand? Most providers today will give you Gigabytes of space.
Are you able to use the tools you want to use to maintain your site? FrontPage extensions? Site builders? File transfer and directory maintenance tools? Site back-up tools?
Are dynamic web site tools available? Scripting languages such as PHP, Python, Ruby, etc make creating complicated sites much easier.
Are database tools available? Combined with scripting languages such as PHP or Ruby, databases allow you to not only store your site effectively, but allow it to be edited easily by multiple people.
Can you use web content management tools such as the various Wiki's, Joomla!, PHPNuke, etc? These allow you to rapidly create and maintain a dynamic, interactive web site.
Not everyone will have the technical skills to utilize these tools, but our Lions Clubs are continually getting young, eager new members who do have the skills and inclination to extend web sites in this way.
How can I improve services to my Community and my Club or District without increasing cost?
This is really easy. Choose one of the site providers which allows you to expand when you need to. Most hosting providers have several levels of service, and will allow upgrades without disrupting your web site, but make sure this is the case first. Many hosting companies provide Gigabytes of space as part of the package - large enough for many pictures, Club bulletins and administrative documents. Another thing to look out for is bandwidth limits. Most providers allow for Gigabits per month of traffic before either charging you more, or cutting you off. Be aware that these limits may exist.
If you plan to be ambitious (and even if you don't), be sure to pick a hosting company that has tools - the more the better, generally. You will likely find that these will be companies providing hosting on Linux platforms, generally running Open Source applications, so you don't need to pay for the company to buy the tools, only to maintain them. All of the tools and capabilities mentioned above should be available for $10 per month or less.
Some technical "under the hood" things you can do to improve access to the site.
Number one on the list - buy a domain name! Your Lions Club has a name associated with its community, so it is usually easy to remember. Choose a domain name that reflects your Club or District name. Although usually a bit more expensive, I recommend using the .org top-level domain (tld). Cost will not exceed $35 / year. However, you are free to use whatever you wish. Once your Lions Club or District owns the domain name, you never need to change it, no matter how many times you move hosting providers, or who maintains the site for you. Just remember to renew! And register in the Club / District name.
Now some more detail on the items mentioned under making your site easier to find.
Use tags to make your site more attractive to the search engines.Not only will this make sure relevant pages come up when a search term is put into a search site such as Google, but the phrase is placed at the top of the browser window to remind the viewer what they are looking at. This html tag is placed in the page header section, and will usually be done for you if you use site creation tools. Choose it carefully for each and every page.
Use tags everywhere that you use an tag (or in the "image description" box for site building tools). Should your image not load, or should the site be viewed by someone using a web browser for visually impaired people, the images will still have meaning.
Don't use too much javascript (the basis for one kind of dynamic web page). Some web page designers use javascript in place of databases and scripting languages, and make the site entirely unusable by search engine crawlers and web readers for the visually impaired. Use it judiciously, such as when obfuscating e-mail addresses, or preventing the easy copying of site pictures.
Create a site map. There are many free site map builder tools available. Google provides one. Visit Google's Webmaster Tools pages. Site maps allow a visitor in a hurry to quickly see if what they are looking for is on your web site. They also do the same thing for search engine crawlers or robots.
Making a web site easy to maintain takes work!
Put the effort in up-front to make your site easy to maintain, and accessible to multiple maintainers. A hand-built site is probably hardest to maintain, although can come together quickly. This includes sites created with some site builders, and most sites created with a plain text editor. It is often difficult to share among multiple people the work of keeping a site up-to-date, if the ability to change it is not controlled.
Content management systems (CMS's) are designed to make a site quick to create, and easy to maintain. Unfortunately, some degree of technical skill is required. Fortunately, most are absolutely free, and are available to play with at your leisure. Set one up on your own PC, and view it locally with a web browser. Tools are available for Windows, Macintosh and Unix computers - no one is prevented from trying. The following elements are necessary:
Web server. Use IIS for Windows, Apache for Macintosh and Unix
Database. Use MySQL for all, or SQLServer for Windows, MySQL for Macintosh and Unix
Scripting language. Use PHP5 for all, for best selection of CMS tools.
Optional GUI database management tool. Most ubiquitous is phpMyAdmin for MySQL.
Each of the tools mentioned above is either freely available, or freely available as Open Source software, to be built from source code, or to be installed as a binary package. I recommend using pre-built binary packages for your computer operating system to all but the hardiest and most technically inclined. Install each package separately - they do not interact (except for phpMyAdmin, which requires that PHP5 and MySQL to be installed first). Almost all of the inexpensive hosting providers will supply all these tools, but make sure they do before signing up. You can easily run both your current web site and a test web site built with a CMS in the same place - they do not interfere with on another. This makes it easy to transition back and forth.
Once the required tools are available, either on your test system or at your provider, it is time to choose a CMS. Here are but a few of dozens:
Joomla!
Mambo
Drupal
PHP-Nuke
TikiWiki
See for more information and to try each
I personally lean toward TikiWiki or pmWiki for ease of use, but many prefer PHP-Nuke (even with all its security problems).
Installation is usually as simple as unpacking the files in the destination location on the web server, and pointing a web browser to an install file. It may be necessary to create an empty database and a user, but the CMS installer will do all the rest, asking for information as it needs it. Then all that remains is to customize the site and add content.
The user communities for each of these CMS tools provides a very rich source of help when you are stuck. I suggest running a parallel site in a subdirectory of the main web site, so that you can easily select the test site to see how it looks and compare to the old site. Almost any mistake is correctable, and if it is on a test area, no one but you will see it until you fix it. Most CMS tools have facilities to make back-ups, and to roll back a change just made using the back-up.
The seminar presentation will expand on the areas presented above.
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