Re: [Dfey-nw-discuss] Website - www.dfey.org

[Chris Hilliard]

I think that Wordpress with RSS would be a useful tool, and may reduce
the bandwidth requirements if the site gains masses of pictures, as
well as making a significant amount of the web work both automated and
easy to pass on - a static XML or HTML site has a tendency to develop
as many as four different styles as a web developer has moved on and
not left any of the tools or instructions for maintaining the site - a
standardised template and wordpress would theoretically solve that
issue.

As stated, Drupal and Joomla! would be like using an orbital laser to
open a peanut as far as I can see, although that is just my personal
experience.

I feel that a blog and RSS feeds would be the best option for the
dissemination of information relating to the group overall, but only
if it is updated with some regularity - this means that we would
possibly need to set up an editorial and hunting team to bring news,
events and meetings to the blog and RSS feeds, and I, for one, would
be more than happy to help with that if it was decided that that was
the route that we wanted to go as a community.

A question that we need to ask ourselves about the idea of a heavily
static site is, how do we show visitors that this isn't a deserted
site? how do we keep interested surfers visiting again and again? If
the information is purely static, there will be no need for people to
visit the site, and at which point it becomes as useful as a coaster
for a mug - it looks ok, serves a purpose but is never really looked
at for any great amount of time, and it appears that the group has
either abandoned the site or fallen apart completely, which is not the
signal we want to be giving out as far as I can see. But again, this
is based on personal experience and beliefs.

thanks,
badspyro

On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 9:27 PM, Tim Dobson<address@hidden> wrote:
> Robert Leverington wrote:
>>
>> On 2009-07-27, Tim Dobson wrote:
>>>
>>> Concept One:
>>> Static front page. Blog for announcements, meeting announcements etc,
>>>
>>> Concept Two:
>>> No dynamic content - Static simplistic homepage with several links to
>>>  simplistic pages off from it. Modelled on in concept, if not in
>>>  implementation.
>>
>> My personal opinion would be to use the latter, I don't think we'd have
>> enough regular updates for a blog and in any case it would probably just
>> go stale.  Furthermore an entirely static site will encourage discussion
>> about content.  Announcements could simply be listed on a page and
>> removed when they expire, or something of that nature.
>>
>> Ideally all pages would use the same template though, otherwise it would
>> be far from professional.
>
> Well it's worth bearing in mind "style" isn't necessarily related to
> "template".
>
> Template is to do with layout of the content on the page, style deals with
> how it all looks.
>
> Multiple templates don't necessarily look unprofessional (well not in my
> opinion at least)
> http://www.getgnulinux.org/linux/
> is a different template to
> http://www.getgnulinux.org/
>
> I don't think a blog is really the right answer for DFEY.org - individual
> groups should really be announcing their meetings - they might wish to have
> their own blogs to etc but for the time being I think  we'd be best off with
> a site with no time orientated update system, with concise, short, articles
> about what DFEY is, why DFEY exists etc, how to get involved etc being
> displayed and providing links to relevant resources elsewhere.
>
> Tim
>
>
>