Suncoast STC - Chapter Website Information

[Clyde Parson]

Suncoast Members,

As many of you are aware, a decision was previously made to rework our
website in order to meet some perceived shortcomings of the Wordpress
platform. The following information provides an update regarding that
decision and its subsequent modifications.

Following the decision to update the site, a web committee was formed and
initial planning began during the first part of this year. After several
months of planning and some initial work effort, the project was reevaluated
and the decision was made to roll back to the previous version of the site
due to the underestimation of the total work effort required to make the
change. The decision from that point was to investigate the possibility of
reworking the Wordpress templates in order to address the identified
shortcomings which I have personally undertaken during the last couple of
weeks. In the coming days, I will be launching a new version of the website
that will address many of the needed changes identified during the initial
website planning meetings.

At this point, I would like to extend my most sincere apologies to those of
you who volunteered for the website committee. I know that many of you were
very enthusiastic about working on the new site while adding to your skill
set.  I believe this process would have provided an excellent manner for
many of you to learn a new skill or brush up on an existing one.
Unfortunately, so much time has passed since the initial decision that I
felt it necessary to push through the process as quickly as possible in
order to bring this to an acceptable production level.

As stated, I have managed to address most of the identified issues but there
will be one notable exception.  Some have expressed a desire for our site to
contain a members only section which requires a login in order to access the
information contained there.  As I was researching functionality to make
this possible, I spent some time thinking about the "why" and the "what" of
this request.  After careful consideration of the following items that could
represent the content for this area, I have come to the listed conclusions
for each:

   - Jobs - Since we've gone back to the old site, we've had multiple jobs
   posted by different people including recruiters who are just signing up and
   posting for the first time.  If we hide those postings, no one would know we
   even collect them and there would be no incentive for a recruiter to post
   when you assume they are trying to reach the largest audience possible.
   - Member Directory - This info can already be obtained from the main STC
   site so there's no reason to reinvent the wheel.  This also creates an
   administrative burden when we gain or lose members or have contact info
   changes.
   - Employer Listings - The Employer Directory that we have was last
   updated in 2004. I don't believe that's particularly valuable information at
   this point.
   - Chapter Admin - I don't believe it hurts anything for a non-member to
   see our meeting notes.

Considering these conclusions, I am going to publish the revamped site
without a members only area.  I did find a way to make this possible and if
we can come up with a truly compelling reason why we need this, I will be
happy to implement it at a later date.

I appreciate your understanding in this matter and hope that you find the
reworked site to be of value.  I will send a separate email at the time the
revised site is launched.

Regards,

Clyde Parson
President, Suncoast STC
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.stc.org/pipermail/suncoast-l/attachments/20080826/bd5c1f0f/attachment.html