Creating and maintaining a website for your RSO at the College Of Business
George Wiman, webmaster for College Of Business
If you are the president or webmaster of a Registered Student Organization (RSO) in the college, the most important factors to consider are continuity, relevance, accessibility, hosting, and institutional identity. Let’s explore each one of these as it relates to your organization:
Continuity
You don’t want to leave an orphan website hanging out there for your organization! Remember that when you graduate, you will need to hand this task to someone else. Keep the important information in some central place – maybe an object like a “red accordion-folder” that can be easily identified and remembered. This folder should contain:
- A bound notebook with site-maintenance information, like the file-mapping address and instructions for editing the web pages, the web address itself, any relevant passwords and login names (especially for off-site hosting), contact information for site support (such as the COB webmaster), plus your notes from updating the site and what software you used
- A CD or jump drive with website files and content such as pictures, plus RSO logo files to be used when creating pages.
- Any literature or addresses that describe web standards from the parent national organization.
Don’t leave the next RSO webmaster struggling to connect to the web server and update files. When you leave, make sure the web folder is in order, and give it to someone who will be responsible to give it to the next webmaster. Usually that is your chapter president.
Relevance
You need to update your home page frequently – at least once a week. When someone visits your website and sees information that is clearly out-of-date, they will leave. A stale website drives people away from your organization! Obviously if your site is difficult to update you will not keep it as fresh as it should be: you should consider a blog format for the home page, with static pages in tabs for less time-sensitive information. See Hosting & Software below for tips on making this vital task very easy.
Accessibility
Avoid extremely fancy or obscure website design and navigation. Keep it clean, easy-to-read, and simple. Consider using ready-made templates that are already certified for handicap access as well. Show these templates to several people and get their honest reaction. Your site visitors will thank you and so will your national organization.
Contact your national organization, by the way, to see if they have a professionally-designed templates or themes you could use. Why re-invent the wheel?
Hosting
(See the exciting development at the bottom of the page! Managing an RSO website is about to get a whole lot easier…)
The College Of Business provides hosting for RSO websites within the college. Come see me to add a new person to the file access list for your site. You can also use off-site hosting for special needs, but be sure that all the contact information, login addresses, passwords and so forth, are in your webmaster notebook.
Off-site hosting might be as inexpensive as “free” (on WordPress.com) on up to fully-developed commercial hosting with a company like DreamHost. You don’t have to spend a lot of money: even the free hosting and templates at WordPress give excellent results, with almost no technical knowledge necessary on your part. You can sign up, pick a template, and start making pages with very professional results. Technical maintenance is done for you.
Institutional Identity and design
Contact your national organization to see if they have a ready-made template (or if you are lucky, a WordPress theme!) that you can use for your site. Or, perhaps they will even offer website hosting for their local chapters.
Be careful with institutional logos and images – your national organization’s and those of the college and the university. Most institutions have guidelines for their correct use. If you are not sure, please ask.
Wherever your site is hosted, and whatever its web address, be sure that Christine Knuth knows about it, so that it can be reviewed for inclusion on our RSO website link page!
Software
The software and design tools you use are entirely up to you. But please remember that the next webmaster for your organization will have to make sense out of your creation. Consider using a Content Management System like WordPress. Then updating pages is as easy as logging into the site and editing a simple web form. Even completely re-styling the whole site is as simple as choosing another template and clicking “Activate”. (Caution – be sure to get your themes directly from WordPress.org. “Free” themes from random sites often contain malware.)
If you insist on designing your own site from scratch, make sure that you adhere to W3C design and accessibility standards, keep your code clean and logical, and include comments for the next developer to understand your design and layout choices. If you don’t know what these things mean, please use a professionally-designed template.
Avoid non-web software like Microsoft Publisher or Word. Although they are capable of “Save As” a web page, the resulting code is a maintenance nightmare, usually not handicap accessible, and will have to be discarded by the next webmaster.
An exciting new development in RSO web presence!
The Student Activities Center has contracted with CollegiateLink.net to provide a Content Management System for RSO websites. This is an exciting option because it allows you to maintain an RSO site with far more convenience than the old way detailed above. To get started, go to the Student Involvement Center page and call the contact number there. Identify yourself as the webmaster for your RSO and request access to the system; they’ll talk you through it.
Want to talk about it?
Feel free to stop in at room 025 (under the Atrium steps near the vending machines) and see me. If I can’t see you right then (Technology Support gets pretty busy sometimes) I’ll be glad to set up an appointment to discuss your RSO website plan.
Thanks,
- George Wiman