Building a Great Chapter or Regional Website
What makes a successful region or chapter website for both the audience who visits the site and the webmasters who maintain the site? There are many important characteristics, including frequent, fresh content, easy maintenance and a strong tie with the International Headquarters site. Find out how your chapter and regional webmasters can make their jobs easier.
Kevin Andrea, webmaster for the chapter at De Anza College and 2004-05 Northwest District Vice President for the Nevada/ California Region, recently implemented two tools that help make his chapter website, http://www.ptkasa.org, a success. Kevin spiced up the site with Headquarters RSS feeds and Wordpress, a blogging software.
With RSS, your chapter or regional website can feature Phi Theta Kappa Golden Key News Briefs, the Chapter Officer eNewsletter and more, providing fresh content on your site on a regular basis without any extra work for the webmaster. Kevin found RSS "a piece of cake to implement," and has experimented with several different ways to display this content. See the chapter website, http://www.ptkasa.org, for examples. You can find out more about Phi Theta Kappa RSS feeds and how to use them at http://www.ptk.org/rss/.
Blogs, a dated-log format, provide limitless possibilities for adding content to your website. You can use blogging software to post news items, newsletters and calendar events. Blogs can also be created for specific projects, such as tracking your chapter's progress in the Five Star Chapter Development Program or the Hallmark Awards Program. "I looked into Wordpress as the foundation for a new redesign of our chapter's website," said Kevin. He found it easy to get old content into Wordpress and says that the site was running smoothly in no time.
Wordpress is free and easy to use. If your site is hosted by your college, check with your IT department before downloading it. Wordpress also offers hosting options, http://wordpress.org/hosting/.
One of the great advantages of blogs is that responsibility for maintaining content can be shared among as many or as few as needed. The more technically inclined can experiment with the flexibility of Wordpress, but even those with no previous HTML experience will find it's easy to learn how to add content. Keep watching the International website for more tools to add to Chapter and Regional website toolkits! Tell us about your website innovations or send us your questions at webmaster@ptk.org.
