Community Service Progress Report
Chris and I have been working at the Capital City Rescue Mission. They needed help with their website in order to help them promote their organization to the rest of the capital area community. On of our major goals is to help them have a more dynamic and easier to update website. On our first visit, we had gotten familiar with the buildings and learned of their objectives to help others. We also saw the different software ICTs they used to keep information current. They seemed to have this area well taken care of. The next few visits we began to work on their website and learn how they were currently taking care of it.
The current website (as seen in the above image) is very outdated as far as content and technology goes. It has information that has not been updated in months. When the website was originally designed, the code had a mess of HTML tags that overlapped, had incorrect parameters, etc. They also did not take full advantage of CSS in order to keep a constant website style. Currently, Chris created a template that will work in Dreamweaver. Their previous website would not render correctly in Dreamweaver because of how many mistakes there were in their code. The best thing we felt, was to start from scratch with a new website that was based off of their old layout and design. This way, they will easily be able to update it with new information, while their current visitors will still being able to navigate it with the ease.
In addition, we plan on having a blog incorporated into their new website so they can add new news items easily. We will show them how to use the Blogger interface and how to maintain a blog. This way, they can update their news page and inform their visitors of new events. Currently, due to the difficulty of maintaining the website, their latest event is from October of 2006. I have set up a temporary blogger account and will transfer it over to their new website once all of the current pages are recreated.
Even though there is already a running website and we will be keeping the say layout, it takes a long time to transfer over all of the information into a new template. Coping and pasting works for some things, but it will not work for most. We need to redo all of the text formatting in CSS and start from scratch. Once this step is completed, however, it will be much easier to update the website with newer content. As we move the information from the old to the new website, we are constantly making many small changes to correct image alignment, page loading time and stress on the server, various typos, and layout improvements to help with navigation. Over all, the new website is coming along very nicely. It still has a long way to go, but recently we were making great progress.
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