Inside the SAM Website Redesign (Part 2)

Starting yesterday afternoon, we finally got the GoDaddy account setup for the Society for the Advancement of Management website hosting and domain name. I made sure that everything was accurate, and immediately went to work setting everything up.

First things first came the hosting configuration. Thankfully, GoDaddy’s system is really straightforward - a few clicks and a couple user names later the site was “hosted”. Next came the Wordpress installation, which once again GD has streamlined in to a one-click process. The most important steps were to follow, which included skinning the new site, and then obviously building out the appropriate content silos and organizational structure that the site would follow.

After doing some quick searching on the Wordpress.org themes website, I found a very cool theme called QPwilm (Quality Peoples something something something?)… As usual, a quick download, a quick FTP to the new site, and a quick tap of the “Use selected theme” functionality, and the site is up and running in it’s new cloak:

Doesn’t look to shabby if I may say so… Of course there’s still plenty of work - and after two different attempts at installing some calendar plugins, I gave up and went with a simple “Events” page (which works better anyways considering that most of the events happen at the same time and place every week). I did also install the User Photo plugin and tweak around quite a bit of the CSS to customize the site.

The real question is, of course, what do the users think - and will it draw some new attention to our organization? I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the officers of the club will be around 70% happy so far (meaning, if I’ve done my calculations right, that means I’ve got another hour and a half of code-tweaking ahead of me). Whether we can draw new members and retain existing ones remains to be seen.

I posted this, however, to really demonstrate how non-profits and organizations looking to implement a cost-effective web presence can get things done very quickly on today’s web. Wordpress and GoDaddy make a cost-effective solution that 10 years ago us in web development could only dream about. It also proves that web development is now about the fine-tuning - not the gross management of the problem. The next steps for SAMSJSU.org are going to involve mostly maintenance (which can now be distributed) and small modifications that can be managed as they arrive. As the tweaking continues, I’ll keep this blog updated as well, so you can experience some of the trials and tribulations. Have a great one!