Re: Best church websites

Nick Milton wrote:

On Tue, 5 Sep 2006 21:04:50 +0100, Mike Williams
<nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[We've never actually given any overall thought to the content. From
time to time, one of the leaders hands us some text or images and says,
"Put this on the website", and we do.]

Alas, Mike, I fear this may be what they call "arse about face"

Content should be the primary concern, style secondary.

True - but if what you are writing is a framework for information which
changes steadily (which is surely the case in an active community like a
parish), the task of the web designer is to facilitate that flow of
changing information.

So the designer concentrates on design, accessibility, cross-browser
functionality etc (and all the other sorts of thing Mike listed) - the
content will change week to week and day to day.

As long as someone (or preferably several someones) is going to take
responsibility for keeping the content up to date, that's not the web
author's problem in this sort of site.


I've also written a site for a junior football club which has somewhere over
50 teams, of which about 20 use my site format as one of their main means
of communication. I simply don't know what content they have put on
there, without loading each one and looking - it's not my role, and I
certainly don't want to be involved in managing the content for all that
lot (quite apart from the fact that they are responsible for their own
child protection compliance - I definitely don't want to be held
responsible if some team manager gets that bit wrong!). I just make it
easy for them to have a useful website. I originally wrote it just for my
daughter's team, then it sort of generalised itself.....

(My current bit of fun is working out how to migrate them all onto a newer,
far more efficient implementation of the same idea, again written for my
daughter's team but simply asking to be used more widely. Ho hum....).

--
David Aldred
.

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