This article first appeared (in editted form) in the May 2007 Beach Log
to describe the changes coming in June 2007, as well as future proposals.
New Web Site -- June 2007
New Web Site -- June 2007
Volunteer Testers Needed Now
Neal and Connie Clark (Class of 2007) joined the web team in early March. They've survived their first month of Beach Watchers training, and are now busily revamping the web site.
Building on, and extending past work by the web team, the focus is to:
- view the general public as the primary audience, and the web site as our way to share with them what we (Island County Beach Watchers) know and what we do.
- provide consistency across pages to make it easier to navigate, particularly for people who arrive via a Google Search.
- provide easy search on our site (via google), and on combinations of related sites (e.g., Shore Stewards, Lighthouse, MRC, PSAT, . . .)
- provide 'missing' content - for example, brief descriptions of -all- BW projects.
- simplify maintenance of the site by creating the many index pages (e.g., News, Events, Projects, Organizations, . . . ) from information stored in Google spreadsheets. This will drastically simplify page maintenance, and let a small team of people collaborate on maintaining the spreadsheets.
- make certain content more accessible. For example, moving forward, the BeachLog newsletter, in addition to being available in two-column pdf, should also be available in single-column HTML for ease of readability on computer screens.
- add NEW content
- The "Support Us" section has been renamed "Get Involved" and expanded, to describe the many ways that the general public can support us beyond financial contributions.
- A new "Tides" section, provides access to both predicted and measured water levels from NOAA for Seattle and Port Townsend, and also presents a Google map as visual index into available NOAA Tide Predictions for Island County Tide Stations.
The web team will continue to use the Adobe Contribute tool for web content; this allows Beach Watcher volunteers to provide additional content or modify existing content without having to know how web pages work behind the scenes.
What help do we need?
From now until early June . . .
We need people to TEST the Beta site- We need a small number of volunteers to navigate the new site and find typos, discrepancies, or whatever else might detract from its usefulness. Some volunteers would focus on particular sections, say Seining, or Intertidal Monitoring, and other volunteers would just bounce around the site trying to find faults.
From early July (until forever)
We need:- project leaders (or someone on their teams) to provide additional descriptive information, schedules, photos, ... about their project.
-
people to think about new content.
- the "Essays and Photos" section generalizes the former "A Walk on the Beach" essays. Think about what topic (of your choice) you might like to write about. OR, if your forte is serving in an editorial role, help 'webify' the essays of others.
- How about new kid-friendly content. Perhaps many of the educational displays/games used in other outreach programs could be adapted, or new ones invented. The Clarks are glad to provide the programming behind the scenes to make the games work, but need creative educators to define what should be done.
- One of the new folders is "Where We Live", and it currently has information (from the existing site) on Beaches, and Estuaries. How about new sections: Watersheds, Wetlands, Sustainability, ...
- Are you a 'techie' missing getting your hands dirty? We are working with MySql, and scripting languages (javascript, php) but if you've used other scripting languages and good at picking up new languages, you should fit right in.
Ready to help ? Please contact webmasters@beachwatchers.org
Whatever time you can contribute will
really help improve the quality of our web presence.
Whatever time you can contribute will
really help improve the quality of our web presence.
last updated May 2007
. . .