Preparing Content for your Web Site
An overview - keep it simple!
The process of building (and maintaining) a school web site is dominated
by two skills - technical skills (creating
and laying out the web pages) and information
skills (collecting
and maintaining the content to go on those pages). Of these, the
information
skills are the hardest to master, since they involve:
- dealing with the wide range of people who hold the information
that you are seeking
- retrieving the information from them in a format that you can easily
use
- attempting to strike a balance between how they would like the
information presented and what is actually feasible on a web page
What often happens
What will often happen in the process of gathering content is this:
- You ask someone for a piece of content "for the school
web site".
- They find the content and spend n hours inserting Clip
Art,
thinking about specific colours, particular fonts and
carefully laying
out the document on the page (in a package like Microsoft
Word).
- They give you the finished document on a disk
or CD or in an email.
- You spend n hours undoing all their formatting so
that the document will fit in to the format of the rest of
the school web site!
- You show them the finished page.
- They wonder "Where have all my Clip Art pictures, colour scheme
and fonts gone?"
A less painful method
- Ask someone for a piece of information for the school web site.
- Tell them not to worry about formatting but instead to pay attention
to the content - the spelling, grammar and the style of the document.
- Tell them that all you are after is a piece of plain, unformatted
text (apart from maybe some emphasis using bold, italics and
bulleted or numbered lists).
- If they are desperate to include a particular image, ask them
to supply it as a separate .gif
or .jpg file on a disk or as an email
attachment.
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