General website rant
 

Hey, Mr. or Miss Chapter Website Coordinator. This one is for you.

When you're making your chapter's website, PLEASE INCLUDE YOUR LOCAL HISTORY. Don't just cut and paste the national history out of your HQ's website and label that the history section. Every chapter has a history of their own and needs to be proud of it!

If you don't know your local history, find it out from your alums. If you can't find them, look in old yearbooks or school newspapers.

I know this is very random but it is something that really bugs me...I think it's disrespectful to not give credit to the people who were brave and enterprising enough to start something new at your campus. National history is important but it's not everything...if there was no local history, there'd be no national history either.

www.phitauzeta.org

is that acceptable?

JFL

http://www.angelfire.com/my/LambdaChi/Greek.html
http://www.angelfire.com/my/LambdaChi/Overview.html
http://www.angelfire.com/my/LambdaChi/Time.html


these are from our undergrad website!

JFL

That's my biggest pet peeve about web sites! It makes it appear that the events you participate in aren't important if you don't update them for 2 years.

Great ideas :)
 

I am the Alumnae Web/Tech Consultant for Delta Zeta Sorority. Basically my "job" is to make sure that all alumnae sites are upated, have working links, no spelling errors, and that all information in correct and current.

DZ also has a College Technology Committee that takes care of the college chapters. We do our best to stay in contact with webmasters and Presidents to make sure that all web sites follow Delta Zeta Policies.

The major problems we run into are sites that have been abandoned. These are sites where the web master graduated and didn't leave information on how to update the site (like the password, etc), or with my alumnae chapter sites, webmasters moved to a different state, or the chapter couldn't find a replacement for the webmaster, and the site just sits there until the provider takes it down.

For a site (XYZ) to be taken down (for example, using a free service like yahoo), people have to stop visiting it. After a few years of no traffic, yahoo would probably take XYZ site down. But since other sites have links the XYZ site, people continue to visite. It's a nasty cycle. If you don't have the password for XYZ site, yahoo won't just take it down on someone's word that the site is old and useless.

I have come up with suggestions for my webmasters, for example, always leaving records with the current president about passwords, ftp information, web providers, etc. Usually President files are passed down more complete than say a webmaster's files are...so the information would hopefully stay available if the webmaster leaves or abandons the position.

It really is a sorry state when you do a google search and come up with a site that hasn't been updated since 1994. :rolleyes: All we can do is keep working with the active sites to make sure it doesn't happen again and again.

Turtle Hugs,
Tracy

How about an important part of your headquarter's Web site not working? It's been down for about 1 month now. :rolleyes:

When I was website coordinator for a school district here in town if the site was down for more than 5 minutes it was unacceptable. If we were notified from a parent or faculty that there was a bad link or incorrect info, ALL MY OTHER PROJECTS stopped, till I got that fixed. Huge deal for us. Bigger for me - my jobby was on the line, and the website had about 600 pages of material.

Totally! I think it's especially bad if your chapter started off as a local and was one for a while before going National. It's like the work of those sisters that made it possible for you to be where you are today doesn't count. The old org doesn't exist anymore, but it's only respectful to give it a nod.