Priorities
Our primary audiences and therefore priorities for an effective website are:
- prospective volunteers -- recruit new chapter members and participants in LMV trips, with emphasis on healthcare professionals
- donors and donor organizations -- support web-based donations
- general public -- reinforce a high-quality image of the organization
- members -- provide members with handy access for information and services
- our clients -- inform the villages and people who we serve in Mexico, Southeastern California, and Latin America
To support these priorities, our website must:
- portray the importance of our client-focused mission and the quality of our organization
- provide obvious and easy navigation, with minimum menu depth
- clearly describe the roles we need filled and motivate prospective volunteers to get involved
- allow easy, no-hassle registration of new volunteers, including online membership application and payment
- provide members with easy access to reference information and often-used forms
- for chapter and corporate effectiveness, capture all submitted forms in online databases
Objectives of New Website
With an eye on the above priorities, our new website should have the following characteristics:
- be "minimum maintenance" -- after initial configuring of the website and porting of existing content, the site should not require more than a hour or so per month of volunteer webmaster effort
- allow authoring of information by non-techies -- this is especially true for the most dynamic data such as trip schedules, meeting dates, news articles, trip summaries, etc.
- be low-to-no cost
Strategies for New LMV Website
Factoring the above priorities and strategies, we have chosen to implement the new website along the following strategies:
- build and maintain the website based upon a robust, free, public domain Content Management System (CMS) -- CMS selected is Joomla, a leader in the market
- populate the website with articles that are (to a reasonable extent) "static" -- avoid dating articles unduly, and have all visitor communications addressed to LMV "positions" (e.g. chairman, chief pilot) rather than to explicit email addresses
- rather than reinventing wheels, leverage additional industry standards for such things as:
- calendaring -- use Google Calendar
- dynamic article content (e.g. trip stories) -- use Facebook "wall" postings
- photo albums -- use Facebook
- video postings -- use Facebook
- database -- use Zoho Creator
- the CMS and the additional standards mentioned above are all free services
- our web hosting service is donated by Sierra Web Design
References
- Inventory of Pages (old versus new sites)
 LMV Web Redesign Project Plan - 30Sep2009.pdf | 3 Kb |
