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Have you ever thought of maintaining your chapter's website, or, worse yet, CREATING your chapter's website?
Relax! Creating a website for your chapter isn't as difficult a task as it used to be, thanks to the many tools that are available to create websites. We're not going to cover any of them in this page - not just as yet anyway. But if you want to know more about tools that can make maintaining your website easier, the Internet can help point you in the right direction. Our tutorials on how to make a web page come later.
What we're going to talk about here is how to DESIGN a website. Designing a chapter website can be a challenge, but you can make it a much easier task if you tackle it in a logical, organized fashion.
Before designing any website, you need to step back and think about who the VIEWERS for the website will be. Anybody who goes to a website is that website's viewer. Why are they there? What do they want from this site? How easy can you make it for them to find it? Will the viewer be satisfied enough to come back?
Who are the viewers for an APO chapter's website? Some are obvious, some are not. Here's an incomplete list:
APO members
APO pledges
People thinking about pledging
People on campus
People in the community
Local News Media
Parents of Brothers/Pledges
APO members need information about the day-to-day operations of the chapter: who the officers are, when meetings are, when events are and so forth. Pledges need much of the same information as well as information on pledging events. People who are thinking about pledging the chapter want to know what APO is all about in 50 words or less, and they want to know how much time they'd be committing themselves to if they pledge. Alumni want to know what's going on with their old chapter and how they can help out and when they can come visit and see old friends. Brothers from other chapters and sectional and regional staffers want to know about major events your chapter's hosting, and how they can get to you from potentially very far away.
People on campus and people in the community want to know something about this organization that's asking them for help or (even better) that's offering to help them, but the information they want will be slightly different. Local news media such as newspapers, radio and TV may visit a chapter's website to learn more about them before doing a story.
Finally, parents of brothers and pledges may visit the site, wanting to know what this APO thing is and why their son or daughter wants additional allowance to participate in pledging activities. This is the chapter's opportunity to impress upon parents the positive qualities of the fraternity.
Once you've decided who your POTENTIAL viewers are for your chapter's website, the next thing you need to decide is who your LIKELY viewers are. If your campus is a small liberal arts school where nobody uses computers, it's not likely that Brothers, Pledges or prospective pledges will use the web to look things up about your chapter. If everyone in your chapter has parents who are petrified of the infernal machine, it's not likely that you need to worry about pitching the virtues of a leadership seminar or rover scout training to them. Just like each chapter is unique, each chapter will have their own answer to the question, "Who is likely to be using our website?"
Just because a viewer isn't likely doesn't mean that you shouldn't put things on the website for them--it just means you should minimize your effort to pitch information at unlikely recipients. Even if you don't think it's likely that someone will want to send your chapter a letter out of the blue, it's worth it to put your chapter's postal mailing address on your website. The effort on your part is minimal, and the information will likely never change, but you've easily and quickly provided a method for someone not on your campus to send you physical mail.
Now you have your list of viewer, and you've categorized them as likely and unlikely. The next task is to try and figure out what they WANT. What does a brother want when they come to your chapter website? What does a pledge want? What does a prospective pledge want?
This decision making process should take a little while. Brainstorming with other brothers and pledges is a good idea. Ask around. You'll get a lot of stupid ideas, but every so often, you'll get a gem of an idea ("I wonder if I could check how many service hours I have so far this semester using the website"). Don't worry if you don't know how to do it. Write the idea down and save it. Take all the ideas you know how to do and put them together.
Once you've decided what information your viewers will want, now it's time to ORGANIZE your site. You could put each piece of information on it's own page, and then link to that page from the home page of the site. That' however, is not an easy way to navigate a website.
In general, the simplest way to organize information in a website is in a hierarchy, where you chunk information up into categories and then put those categories as menu items on the main page of the website. These categories tend to be generic, like "Service", "Fellowship", "Pledging", "Calendar" and the like. The great thing about the web is that a piece of information doesn't need to appear in one category only. It may be appropriate to put a link to service project descriptions under "Service", but you may also want to link to them from a page under "Pledges" that talks about the service your chapter does.
However, this isn't the only way that you can organize a website. Just remember this when you're trying to figure out how to organize your information: not everybody who will be looking at this site will be you, and some of them may not even come from your chapter. Try to think of how an outsider would see this site, and organize it to make it easy for them.
Finally, you need to put the site together. But that, my friend, is the topic for a document all its own: The Basic HTML Basic Tutorials (How To Create A Web Page).
This special section of APO-EVNET (the first, if not the only of its kind in APO Philippines, I think) is specifically set up for the beginners and APO Web Master wannabes. Consisting of two modules, this tutorial will surely help those (which many APO members already have) who want to create their own Chapter Web Sites or their own Personal Home Pages. :-)
aPo-EvNeT Administrator
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