Web Design Committee

Ok, is this one public? Sorry everyone!

It’s public! No worries!

I don’t know much about web design, personally, but I do have stuff I’d like to see. One of the major things I’d like to have is a forum (similar to the discussions on here) where we can continue organizational assemblies after Wednesday night. Because meetings are only an hour long and we have a lot to cover, I often feel rushed. I don’t feel like we get to discuss everything in the detail that it deserves. So if we have a website, we can use it to continue discussions of organizational stuff. Thoughts?

Naturally, I’d also like to see a calender online, preferably one that people can edit as new events take place. We could even color co-ordinate it, with one color representing Free School events, and another color representing “sister happenings” around the area.

I don’t know much about web design, either, but I do have constant access to the internet and I am decently computer literate, I think I could learn. Can anyone teach?

I second having a forum/discussion board. I really like this set up and I have been using it. I do think it will (continue to) be vital to summarize and bring these online discussions to the assembly. I also second the editable, color coded calender.

Maybe we could have all of the publications we have archived on the website? maybe even old posters? Minutes?

Perhaps we could take a virtual field trip and check out other collective’s websites to get ideas? They might even be willing to share their secrets, and give us html codes or whatever the kids use now-a-days.

I’m going to buy some sever space tonight to put up my own website. If folks are interested I can host the site on my space, we’d just need to get a domain name for it.

I do know a bit about web design. I’m not going to be the fastest option for putting it together, but with help, I can get one up for us to use.

Having a forum/discussion board, as well as a calendar are easy enough.

Hosting old files won’t be too difficult either. I can keep folks updated as I put my own site together/get server space so we can have folks putting together one for the MPFS.

Check out Joomla for more information. It’s a really easy to use content management system and would allow us to have multiple authors for the website. So anyone with administrator rights could sign on and put up news/events/etc.

How much is that going to cost you? I can contribute $$, should we start a pool to reimburse? Is the domain name just going to be mpfreeschool.com? Can we train for web design over the internets (through joomla) or do we need to schedule something?

Since the server is for my own website, I’m not really worried about reimbursement. I’m getting a pretty decent deal, and so long as the MPFS site doesn’t become insanely huge (talking several hundreds of GBs worth of material here), everything should be alright. The only thing that is going to cost money is buying the domain name – which ranges between $10-20 a year (average is $15, but I’ve seen the prices vary).

My opinion is we should go with some form of MPFS (mpfreeschool, mpfs, whatever).org. We’re promoting a not-for-profit organization being the key.

In terms of training, I’m still learning more about Joomla myself. Most of the training materials are online, so there is a lot of documentation for folks to learn online. If people want to do a workshop on it, I think that’d be really helpful. But that wouldn’t have to happen for a while. Not until the site is up and running, at the very least.

A general web design one we could do much earlier than that, but it won’t be of much use to folks who want to work specifically on the Joomla site. This would just be something more general on XHTML/CSS, file systems, and the like just to talk about web writing.

Something HUGE that I want to say here, though, is that we should be extremely careful about putting together a website. Not for any security culture reasons or anything, but more because this can be an intense project, and the last thing we need to do is have the website become an organization-wide project…to the detriment of everything else. Putting together a committee for the web design is a very smart move because we honestly can’t have the website become the org’s key project and it very easily can if we let it get too big. I know this hasn’t come up yet, but it’s just been a lingering fear in the back of my mind. For now, we should have folks who are interested in the web building/design part come in for the committee, but we should try to limit the amount of time it ends up taking in regular organizational meetings. That’s just my own view on the matter – it’s obviously all up to the group as a whole.

We should just proceed with caution on this project, is all.

I think you’re right that there should be a workshop. Those who are interested can come and decide if it would be something they’d want to be a part of in an integral way. I would personally interested in the nuts-and-bolts aspects of the website.

I agree that we should archive our newsletters/zines on the website, as well as minutes (and even posters if we’re feeling comprehensive), especially if people from outside Michigan are going to be contributing to the newletter. That way, they’d be able to see the final product without our having to print more copies than we need to, strictly speaking.

Also, how does everyone feel about a blog being a part of the website? It might be redundant if we archive the newsletters, but it’s something that could be updated more frequently by a larger group of people.

Thoughts?