I seem to be back in the website administration business. Just when I get out, they pull me back in. Well, not quite, but I’ll explain.
For the uninitiated, through the years in addition to my personal ode to self-indulgence (this slice of life called joelipe.com), I have managed various websites for non-profit organizations.
- In the late 90’s until 2003-ish, I designed and administered a website for my church, the CSI Congregation of Hudson Valley. I got busy with life, and I stopped attending church there, so I handed off the reins.
- I also designed and briefly administered a youth-oriented website for CSI youth in North America, but the site served an non-existent need, and it didn’t go anywhere. URL is not important, as I don’t even think the domain is around anymore.
- From 2002 to late 2008, I designed and administered a website for the NY Chapter of the Institute of Internal Auditors. For various reasons that I shall not go into, I haven’t attended chapter meetings in more than 3 years, and been too busy to make all the regular updates. I recently transitioned responsibility, and I’m a free man. Looks like they’ve already redesigned it. Good for them. Seven years later, it was looking dated.
Yes, I said “a free man.” Now I’m just challenged to continue to indulge myself here, on this website. It didn’t last long. At my church, they are in need of someone to take over administrative responsibility. Long story short, I agreed to do it. Before I agreed to take it over, the lingering question was how would I avoid not getting overwhelmed with updates?
The problems with all the previous websites were performing the weekly/monthly updates. The designs were aesthetically pleasing (yes, I can say that), but it was all manual. The posting of content and formatting would take forever, and my old version of the joelipe.com website was no better come month-end when I had to archive the previous month. If I was going to take on another website, the update process had to be streamlined. The current website is located at www.stbarnabas-sbnj.org, and you can tell it’s a bit dated. Callling it “dated” is okay, because everything gets dated after a while.
My answer? WordPress to the rescue! I’m exploring a streamlined design, and using WordPress as the content management system. WordPress could do for this website what it did for my personal domain:
- Multiple users could publish updates, so one person (me) wouldn’t be the bottleneck.
- Themes are readily available, so I don’t have to work so hard to design one from scratch.
- Archiving, searching, etc, are all built-in.
Me smart. It’s not an overnight process, but I’m researching in my limited free time. I want to put something tangible in 30 days, and move to WordPress officially in July.