What kind of a message is your web site portraying to the people that visit it? Are you slow? Are you outdated? Are you boring? Are you confusing? First impressions are important, even to those that active in your organization. You need to make sure that your web site gives the positive, attractive, appearance that you want the public to associate with you. In order to rebuild a site into an effective, useful portal for information about your organization you need to do a lot of prior planning and research before you even set down at the computer.
One of the most important decisions you will need to make is how the web site is to be created and maintained. There are many options available to amateur webmasters for creating a site that range from the very simple to the very complex. Each option for creating a web site has its own advantages and disadvantages. The four most common options, other than hiring a professional site designer, are:
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Raw HTML- coded by hand, this is not a job for the weak of heart. If you learned to code HTML in college or through a class chances are also good that many of the HTML tags you learned have been depricated in the years since you first learned it. While coding raw HTML provides you with almost limitless design possibilities it is not recommended for the beginner.
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HTML Editing Software- Software packages such as Dreamweaver and Microsoft Office can create web pages using a standard word processing style layout. What you see is what you get, and the programs are often quite flexible in what they can do. For a beginner this is often the best bet, but realize that it does have its limits.
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HTML plus add on scripts- Once you have your site created (using Dreamweaver, Word, or another program) you can then add on small programs known as scripts to add special functions to your web site. The most common of these would be a script to display and store calendar information for the coming year's activities. Other examples include chat rooms or forums where students can post questions and receive advice or answers from faculty or other class members.
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A Content Management System- The CMS is the next level of web site design. Running off of a set of software that is installed on the web server the CMS creates pages using a database of information rather than raw HTML. When a page is requested, the CMS goes to the database, pulls in whatever information is needed for that page, and then sends the completed web page out to the person that requested it. The beauty of the CMS is that you can make major changes to the content and layout of your web site without having to know a single thing about HTML. CMS content is also dynamic, meaning that it can update itself without the hassle of changing individual web page files. In a CMS your calendar always shows the correct week of the year, it can pull in news stories from other web sites, and it can automatically post or remove content based on what day of the year it is.
