[NSRCA-discussion] Revising the front page

[Martin X. Moleski, SJ]

Stuart Chale wrote:

> I agree that right now the IMAC site looks a bit more polished than our
> site.

I agree with that.

> Marty has put a lot of time, I'll repeat a lot of time into the
> site and I think his answers might have sounded a wee bit defensive but
> I'll leave that as it is :)

Yes, I'm defending the work the webteam has done for free for the NSRCA.

And I'm offering information about where we are, how we got there,
and where we plan to go.

The alternative to telling our side of the story is to expect people
to use ESP.

> It takes a lot of work to put together a quality site and then a lot of
> work to keep making updates. This takes people willing to do the job.
> Not to make an excuse but the webteam has varying website, and
> programming skills, and time.

That is just a description, not an indictment.

Folks with more skills--or folks who want to donate money for
professional services--may step up to the plate any time they
want.

If people are content to let me act as webmaster, what we'll have
is incremental improvements to the site.

If people want to replace me as webmaster, you may treat this
as my resignation letter.  Go for it!

> We are straddling two sites trying to make the new one work better and
> be more informative. There are still a few hurdles to cross and it does
> take time. I have been involved in spurts but just installed the new
> forum based on SMF. Much more robust and will allow more options, plus
> it looks better than the one we had. In order to install it, bridge it
> to joomla so that all the users are the same, change the graphics to
> match our site, change and add the navigation buttons, work out the
> kinks so that it looks right when you get an email that the topic you
> were watching has a new response. Then I had to change our template to
> allow the recent forum posts to go to the top of our website, moved
> polls there as well (our template had no provision for this) took the
> equivalent of 2 to 3 full work days. Now if I knew more about
> programming and modifying php I might have gotten it done in a day, but
> I have limited knowledge of it. Just an illustration of the amount of
> work that this takes.

Much appreciated.  Thanks, Stuart!

> Hopefully we will start getting more contributions of articles, collate
> those that are already on the web and link to them or copy them to the
> nsrca site. Hopefully our president, vice president etc (no pressure
> guys) will make frequent posts to keep us updated on what is happening
> on pattern as you see on the front page of the imac forum.

Derek is an active member of the webteam and maintains several pages
on the site.  He gave the history a thorough going-over.

> The webteam can convert their submissions or the site can easily be made
> so that they can simply type in from home right on the site what they
> want to convey. This is one of the nice things about a CMS system like
> Joomla (many others out there) Right now the front page has random posts
> of information but you are right some of it needs to be removed and or
> updated.

We can play around with that.

The thing to do is to modify our approach to the content area on the
front page.

Instead of continuing to edit the one article (nsrca.us), we can create
one article for each headline on the page.

I've created Front Page as a Section and "article" as its only
category.

To add a new article,

Content/Article Manager/New
Section: Front Page
("article" will be automatically selected)
When writing the article, you may write a couple of lines,
then use the "More" button at the bottom of the edit screen
to give the user the option of reading more of the article.

If it's a short notice, there's no need to do that.

Content/Front Page Manager determines the order in which
articles display on the page.

You may show the title of the article (as in most of them
on the page) or hide the title and use a headline (as
I did for the squib about the poll).

If anyone would like to volunteer to watch the front page
and keep it fresh and in good order, the position is
available.  Free training.  Hours: negotiable. Salary:
the gratitude of the readership.

				Marty