GOBSA

After several years with a website originally created by Pin Oak Web Designs and maintained by Heather Thompson of HT Dezines, GOBSA is pleased to now present this new website.  In addition to everything provided by the old site, look for improvements to the photo gallery, a new events calendar to which you can subscribe, RSS feeds, and a searchable member roster.  Plus, this site has been designed to be updated and maintained by GOBSA’s own members which is anticipated to provide a cost savings.

At the September board meeting, a web design consultant was invited to make a pitch for a new and simpler to maintain website.  The thought was that if it were simpler to maintain, content could be added more frequently and kept more up-to-date.  To that end, the consultant recommended a “blog” format.  GOBSA member Walter Warren, having had some experience with creating a blog, thought this was a good idea and offered to develop a prototype for the board’s consideration.  That prototype became this website.

Among the benefits expected are

• Cost
• Ease of use
• RSS Feed
• Extensive Photo Gallery
• Subscribable Calendar of Events
• Searchable Members Directory
• Member Provided Content
• Community Links
• Mobile Devices

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The first improvement over the old site is that its anticipated to be cheaper.  The blog is built on the Wordpress system, which is open-source and free.  It’s anticipated that the simplification a site built with Wordpress offers will mean that only minimal web design knowledge is required and that GOBSA members will be able to maintain the site with updates without the need for outside consultants.  Its anticipated that the only fees GOBSA will pay are for ownership of the gobsa.org domain name and for hosting (i.e. rental of space on a computer to run the site).  Elements of the site that previously might have required additional fees for additional storage and service will now use free services such as Google Calendar, Google Picasa, and free Wordpress plugins.

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The principle characteristic of a blog is that content is presented in the form of posts which appear one after the other in reverse chronological order, with the newest at the top of the front page.  Posts of particular importance can be designated “sticky” so that they remain at the top of the home page regardless of when they were posted.  Posts are written by an administrator or others with authorization and at their simplest are no more difficult to create than an email.  The more web knowledge the author has, the more sophisticated can be the post.  The author can also allow or disallow commenting on the post.  If comments on a post are allowed, anyone, even nonmembers, can leave a comment which will appear beneath it.  To maintain order, when a comment is posted the website administrator will receive a notification email and must approve the comment before it becomes visible on the site.

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The site maintains an RSS feed, which is a simplified view of the site that lists only the titles of posts.  Many programs and online home pages like Google Reader, iGoogle and Netvibes allow you to subscribe to a feed and see a view, similar to the Netvibes image below, which is continually updated as new posts are created.  Look for this orange RSS icon in the upper right corner of the site to subscribe.

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A much more comprehensive photo gallery is provided on this new site at the Photos tab.  This feature makes use of Google’s Picasa service for a tremendous increase in available photo storage space.  With photos from the past six years now online, GOBSA is only using 4% of our allotted free storage.  Photos uploaded to Picasa immediately become visible on the website with no changes required to the website design.  The initial view from the Photos tab shows a thumbnail image from each photo album.

Clicking an album will bring up thumbnails of all photos in it.

Clicking a thumbnail brings up the full size photo.  Full size photos can be navigated forward and backward as in a slideshow .

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The calendar of events uses Google Calendar.  Like the Picasa service, changes to the Google Calendar appear on the website automatically with no extra work required.  GOBSA members who have their own Google account and calendar, or those using Microsoft Outlook 2007 or equivalent can merge the GOBSA calendar into their own.  Instructions have been provided for doing this with Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, and Mozilla’s Lightning & Sunbird calendar programs.

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The membership directory can be browsed in alphabetical order by business name, or searched by keyword to find any matching name, company name, or company description.  Email addresses are encrypted to minimize the chance of them being harvested by spammers, yet still read correctly on-screen and can be clicked to send an email to that person.  A map icon appears next to each address which will show the location in Google Maps.

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Different types of users can be created with different privilege levels.  “Administrator” privileges allow for complete access and can make any changes, while “Contributor” privileges only allow writing a post which the administrator must approve before it goes live.  This could open up additional avenues for members to provide content to the site.

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Community links such as SCA, Salute to Construction, etc, are easily maintained and new can be added with no web design knowledge required.

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New posts can be written in advance and automatically published on a day and time to be chosen and can be designated as public, private, or password protected.

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And finally, the site is optimized for users of mobile browsers, like iPhones.  When accessed from a mobile browser, the pages reformat themselves to be a simpler layout that is easier to read and manipulate on a small screen.