Society websites
Posted by Martin Orr on Tuesday, 04 March 2008 at 20:50
The world is full of unfinished websites (in particular, the world of Cambridge societies, but I am sure it applies elsewhere too). The Archimedeans have had a new design (for the same content) for about three years, but it has never been officially adopted. The person who made it left the Society a couple of years ago, but intended to finish it off (although I don't know what still needs to be done); since he has now left Cambridge, presumably it will be forgotten.
For TCMS, our IT officer, who developed the current website, graduated a few years ago, but continued as the society's IT officer. He runs a small software consulting business, and the website is hosted on their server. This has worked OK, but has always meant inconvenience every time a change has to be made, and noone has ever completed some of the missing features of the site. Jon resigned last year, and I have now taken over responsibility for the website. I have been working on a new site, as the current arrangement remains inconvenient for both Jon and us.
I chose not to remain on the TCMS committee because after two years, I have done my bit of feeling responsible when the society fails and of practical help at concerts, and so that I don't either become frustrated or step on people's toes if things are done differently from what I would do. I fear that this puts me into the position that I regard as the problem in the cases above: developing a new website for the society, without otherwise being involved. Nevertheless, as the person who knows what is going on now, I think it is the best arrangement.
Has the TCMS site disappeared completely in the meantime?
Hmm, that's the second time that's happened recently.
I've now moved the Archimedeans website to the new design - I think I've fixed all the problems with the new design that I know of. Quite a few of the intended changes were improvements (moving to MySQL) - any future webmaster wanting to do this can branch off a development version again quite easily. There are still some problems - the forum integration isn't quite as slick as I would like. But it is better than the old site, so might as well be brought live.
Oh, and http://www.archim.org.uk/?old is the old website for those interested, but obviously I'm not given any guarantee as to how long the link will work. :)