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Designing Web Sites for Organizations

Monday, January 8th, 2007 at 7:39 AM Category: Blogging, Meryl's Notes Blog, Tech No comments

I’m the lucky webmaster for three PTA web sites and spent much of the weekend converting one to Movable Type (MT) and starting a new one for Cub Scouts. Thankfully, a friend of mine stepped up to take care of the webmaster role for the latter site, but I told her she would have an easier time managing it using a blogging tool like MT.

So I spent the weekend drafting a site so the committee could discuss the new design at its meeting yesterday. These organizations consist of volunteers, so to ensure an effective web site — I follow two rules:

1. Easy to update.

2. Easy to use.

Since my friend and I make up the audience for these web sites, we ask each other questions when trying them out. Once the design is ready, we ask other friends in the organization to look at the site to see how easy (or not) they are to use.

My experience with these organizations is we don’t know what we want the design to look like, but we know what information needs to appear on the site. So that gives us free reign (not that I like that). These sites don’t have many graphics since we rely on free templates to build them. None of us has the time to design something from scratch to use with the blogging tool.

I gave my friend a choice of Blogger or Movable Type (while WordPress does great work, I find it too difficult for those not familiar with blogging or coding). This provided a good opportunity to see what others — who have never used a blogging tool — find easier to use. Although Blogger was easy, it offered little in terms of control and templates. That’s OK for a lot of people, just not for our needs. She chose MT. Here’s the formula for creating a usable, easy to maintain web site for organizations and personal use:

* Selected a free template from The Style Archive that best matched our needs.

* Installed and tweaked the template and its graphics files.

* Added Google Calendar‘s code so the calendar appears within the blog.

* Signed up for a BubbleShare account for photo albums since BubbleShare lets you display an album within the blog without going to the site (Google’s only works with Blogger and Yahoo! doesn’t let you put the album within an entry).

Typically, it takes no more than a day to follow these steps to create a full web site. However, the original design I picked for one site had messy CSS and was more trouble than it was worth. Besides, I didn’t like what I did with the header. When I switched to another design, it went much better.

Some complained the sites needed more graphics and point to another local school’s PTA web site. When I checked out the web site, I couldn’t find anything without a lot of hunting plus the design was inconsistent. From what I could tell, the site wasn’t easy to update. As volunteers, we don’t have as much time as we’d like to update the site, so the last thing we need is infrequent updates. The site is pointless as parents won’t be motivated to check the site regularly. Thus, those two rules guided the design process. Besides — it would be impossible to please everyone.

I’d love to share the sites so you could see they don’t look identical to their original templates, but the images would be full of “blacked out” content to keep the organizations under wraps and pointless to share.