What We Learned

The Issue of Content

By far, the most time-consuming part of this project was researching information about the communities/non profits and writing and editing content for each website.  This is probably the single biggest barrier that many towns face in developing their own websites.  We spent in excess of two weeks (full time) on each website just in collecting, writing up, and organizing information for each website. This portion of the project was a collaboration of the town clerk (or mayor) or non-profit director, LA Tech student employees, and the Director of the Center for Rural Development.  Students went out to most of the communities and took digital photographs of local officials, and points of interest. They scanned in photographs and converted ordinances, minutes, and newsletters to PDF and HTML format.  We also gathered relevant links for each of the sites.

We gave priority in developing the websites to the towns that provided us with more material for their website since they generally proved to be more genuinely interested in having an Internet presence.  However, the Center for Rural Development ended up finding and writing up most of the content for the websites.

Usability and Accessibility

The most important element of a website is its ease of navigation. Visitors to a website should be able to easily and quickly find the information that they are seeking.  We therefore had to ensure that the website navigation system was clear and easy to use, content was organized in a logical fashion, and that critical content (such as contact information) was present on each website. One of the biggest challenges for some of the student web designers was figuring out what information a visitor to a town website would be likely to be seeking and where would they expect to find it.

Other subtle details were taken into account.  We found that it was very important to check the websites' behavior in different web browsers and screen resolutions.  Often we were surprised by how a website looked when opened up on a different computer using different browsers.  We tried to be considerate of the needs of disabled users.  We minimized the use of frames on our sites.  Whenever possible, we made sure that the text could be zoomed. We also added alternate text to the different images for text readers.

Software

Most of the student web designers found Macromedia Dreamweaver to be the most time-effective software to create a template for a town or non-profit and add the content to it. There is a steep learning curve with this software for some, but those that used it felt that it was worth they time they invested in learning it for the features that it gave them. FrontPage and Adobe GoLive were also used.  In general, we found that for a basic website, using whatever software you are comfortable with is a fine way to go.  Adobe Photoshop was absolutely indispensable for creating graphics, editing photographs, and creating banner designs and backgrounds.

We strongly recommended the freely available Mozilla Composer to the towns and non-profits to maintain their websites. Once a simple html and CSS design is established, Mozilla Composer is a straightforward and easy to learn software package for modifying and publishing web pages. Several town clerks were enthralled by how easy it was to edit their web pages with Mozilla Composer when we conducted the training.

Hosting

Since our project did not include funding to the towns for website hosting, it was the responsibility of the towns to find their own website host.  We intentionally did not include funding for hosting because the cost is not prohibitive, and we felt that if a town was not willing to invest their own money in web hosting, they were unlikely to invest the time and resources in maintaining their website.

We did find that most of the towns benefited by having a staff person come out and walk them through the hosting process as this was a barrier to adoption of a website in some of the communities we worked with.  Our student employees went to the communities, and in some cases sat with the clerk while they ordered the service on the phone so they could answer any questions.  Although we gave some general guidance about choosing a hosting site, we did not advocate for any particular service.  Some of the towns preferred local companies while others chose dedicated hosting companies that offered a more competitive price.