Church Hill Association gets new website
The CHA has rolled out a new website some time recently, with more info than ever before. The minutes from Dec.2006 CHA Board Meeting are now available, and there is a calendar.
The CHA has rolled out a new website some time recently, with more info than ever before. The minutes from Dec.2006 CHA Board Meeting are now available, and there is a calendar.
At the risk of sounding persnickety, couldn’t they find an image of Church Hill to put on the home page? I guess this is an image of Church Hill as seen from Oregon Hill?
Not persnickety at all, but the answer is “No, I couldn’t find a better image”. LOL.
The site is still in it’s shake out period and I would expect the board to make some look and feel requests as they learn to use the new tools. (As you can tell, I’m the guy who built it.) The old site was static and changes were timeconsuming to make. The new site, while it may not look much different, has a set of content tools that allow multiple folks to maintain the site, perhaps even syncing it up with articles in the newsletter. As you can see, the real benefit lies in the new site’s ability to deliver more info, faster.
If anyone has any ideas for improving the site, please shoot them to me and I’ll bring them up with the board. (The good ones at least. LOL) Bug reports are always welcome too. :-)
It’s really cool that the site is going to be updated more regularly.
I know you are still in the “shake out period” but I find it weird that the contact information, offices and “Why Join the CHA?” is in the calendar. There should be a static place to put these once things get rolling more. I’m not sure how much flexibility there is with the new site, but they might be better under files?
Also might be good to include something explaining what the difference between the CHA Board Meeting and the CHA Membership Meeting is and what happens at each. I guess people can figure out what the CAR meeting is.
A links section would be nice.
Also, it could be nice to see the Church Hill newsletter online in a pdf format. It seems like we get ours late, and half of the events are over with by the time we get it.
By the way, is there and e-mail address for you so I or other people can send you pictures of Church Hill? Good photos can do a lot to dispel the perception that Church Hill is nothing but crackheads.
LOL! Let the “requirements” begin! Let’s start with the easy part, my email address. Try rick@higginsmorris.com. I monitor that one daily.
As far as the rest, thanks for the ideas. I will be sure and pass them up the food chain. (I’m just the developer-grunt). But perhaps the paradym of the site needs a better explanation. For the new site, I used a piece of software I had already created. It’s called a wiki. It’s essentially a way of reading articles. The main page shows articles that have been “published”. The search allows you to, well, search. And the calendar is kind of an afterthought. It was meant to show when articles were generated in a timeboxed view, but I decided to add normal event functionality in as well. So everything you read on the site is essentially a unique news article. And yes, that includes contact info, links, etc. I could certainly change the site to move some information outside of the article structures (if the board requests it), but that would force any future changes to again be on my shoulders. The current toolset used by the association “scribes” only allows for updates to articles. Hey, what can I say. I did it for free. LOL!
And yes, adding files such as PDFs is very easy. Articles can have photos, files, etc linked to them.
BTW – The software I’m describing is out there in the public domain. (Open source). If anyone wants to use it, and has some knowledge of perl, head on over to higworld.com and download your own copy. A maintainence release should be coming shortly, but the one on the site is stable.