| Community
Website Development |
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| Community
Websites Are for Everyone |
This article is about building
websites to serve local community groups. While this could
be a single interest group, such as a sporting club or a
writing group, it will more likely be a geographical grouping
such as a town, village or parish.
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Keeping
the Cost Down: As
the budget is always likely to be tight, we will start with
this. As you will know, website design (at this level we
prefer to call it "building") can rapidly become
quite expensive and particularly so when you become involved
with top notch graphic designers. If you are a local community,
then you will have a budget for the job and you must stick
to it.
Community websites are very
much in favour at the moment and so consequently there is
a surprising amount of public funding available. So, we
will help you find the funding from these sources.
Also, through an associated
server service we can provide you with a commercial funding
model whereby local business will be able to take advantage
of the local community websites (several at once if considered
useful), thus returning income to your site.
There will always
be some sort of starting level at which your group can gets
its very own community based site.
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Going
Back To The Beginning:
Before we can get an idea of cost, we have to start at the
beginning. With any form of website development, initial
planning can save hours and hours later. But, even before
that, it is vital to define your goals.
If you didn't already have some idea of the purpose of the
site, then you would not be reading this.
After you have a clear view
of the site goals, together we can then plan the
site. This is not a daunting task and will be nothing
more than a few lines and boxes on a sheet of paper.
Usually this stage of the
procedings can be done on-line
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The
Problem of Content Management:
Building the site is usually straight forward. However,
the very nature of a "community website" demands
ever changing content and there therefore has to be an easy
way whereby the local users can keep the site up-to-date
themselves.
We use two main methods:
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We can
supply a contant management package, with training, which
allows you to build and maintain your own pages.
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We keep
a large part of the time sensitive data on a database
and dynamically build the pages to display it. In this
way the page will show only the data which has been specified
as relevant for that moment. This is ideally suited to
Dates for Your Diary, News pages and so on.
The best solution
is probably a combination of the two. If all your site content
is dynamically generated, then it can be a bit bland. Also,
if you look around, there will always be someone in the community
which would really like to get involved with site content.
Word of warning:
the more helpers that you have, the more you have to have
strict rules and regulations as to who can manage which part
of the site.
So,
keeping the site up-to-date is not the problem that it used
to be and you can certainly generate lots of "community
spirit" in the process. |
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Dates
For Your Diary: An important
part of our Community website service is the Dates for Your
Diary feature. This is provided by a central database facility.
Your community diary dates will automatically appear for 30
days prior to the diary date and then disappear after that
date. |
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Some
Examples: Here are
examples of two different types of community website for
you to look at:
-
Dalston
Parish Website This site contains a wide mix of flat
HTML pages and dynamically generated pages with the data
coming from an underlying database.
- Mungrisdale
Creative Writers This site is owned and run by a group
of creative writers, based around the Cumbrian village of
Mungrisdale.
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What
To Do Now: The fastest
way to get more information is to complete our Community
Website Introduction form which you can access by clicking
here.
If you complete the form,
remembering to tick all the appropriate boxes, we will be
able to come back to you, possibly even with a Cost Estimate,
without having to obtain further information. More likely
we will have a short email dialogue before sending you the
Cost Estimate.
A Cost Estimate is for discussion
purposes and can be amended right up-to the point of confirming
it as a final Quotation.
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| Registering
Your Interest: If you
would like to learn more about any of the above then please
register your name and email address, together with a note
of your specific interest, and we will ensure that your are
kept fully informed. We will send you, completely free of
charge, our regular web mail on webmarketing. Remember, we
will not disclose your name of email address to any third
party.
Click
here to go to the registration form. |
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| Software
Options and the Internet
Software Options
are developing an Internet Marketing division which can provide
the following key services:
- Website design
- Website
usability advice
- E-commerce
- Database backed websites
- Usage tracking
- Webmarketing consultancy
- Email management
- List management
- Developing effective
email marketing campaigns
For more
information about our webmarketing services, click here. |
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Registering
Your Interest |
If you would like to be kept
fully informed about our webmarketing services, then please
register your name and email address below. Subscribing
will not result in more spam! We guarantee it!
Please be aware that Software
Options will never make your details available to any third
party, either through sale or lease of our lists.
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