Agenda Web Committee

The next electronic meeting of the Web committee will be 15 January, 2009.
Results of the previous meeting 15 July can be found here.

No items were developed in form ready to take up at the 15 October meeting date, so no meeting was held then.

Your Web Committee chair will be able to actively promote additional agenda items again beginning in mid-December.

Here is a very rough beginning sketch of some items to be worked on at this point. Some of these were action items earlier, or were mentioned in the report to the Board or in the report of the previous Web Committee meeting. Items here are not necessarily in order of priority. Modifications after the ARARA Board meeting are paragraphs 0 and 5, and the answers in brackets within paragraph 1.

0. Actions at ARARA Board meeting of 2 November, 2008.
(a) Agreed to slightly disguise emails of members to mostly deter spam (mostly done)
(b) Requested regarding Conference pages that links to 2008 procedures be removed, but the poster for the 35th meeting be kept accessible. (done)
(c) Requested that information on officers be removed from the Manual of General Operating Procedures, and that some other sections might be best removed. Triage is in process, to make a proposal to the President on these choices.
(d) Allocated $500 to the Web committee, with the expectation that it will be spent very frugally, to make small incremental improvements to the web site functioning. This may include hiring programming help for a very few hours, and other choices at the discretion of the committee. (No request had actually been made to the Board for funds, since no such request had been considered by the Web Committee.)

1. Any actions by ARARA Board on 2 November which require Web Committee to take notice? First, any Board reactions to what the Web Committee approved for our electronic meetings, for the vetting committee, and for allocation of pages to responsible committees etc.? Other items:
     (a) who can send official ARARA documents to the Web Committee for posting? [Answer: President or person to whom the President delegates this] (b) Is there a goal for how soon after each year's annual conference the logo for the next year should be available and posted? [No decision attempted.] (c) Does the Board wish to take action already on methods of securing the www.ARARA.org web site? [Not discussed. Still for Web committee to do.] (d) Does the Board approve having officers' and committee chairs' emails given on the web site in the form the individual may choose (including not there at all), for the time being either "individual@domain.com" or "individual [at] domain.com"? [The latter chosen.] (e) Does the Board approve eliminating all personal identifying information from the Manual of Operational Procedures? [Yes, in process. Further, some other parts of that Manual need not be online. Web chair will make a proposal to the President on specifics.]

2. Securing the www.ARARA.org web site against incapacity of site owner or administrators (of any kinds)?
     The most relevant experience has been in Colorado (CRAA) where the death of the site owner led to the web site being offline for a few weeks. Jan Gorski has some suggestions relevant to this. We could well copy these. Although the Web Committee has not yet discussed these in detail (your chair's omission), the ARARA Board may wish to give us a go-ahead along these lines. [insert Jan's comments here]
     From Jan Gorski 17 July, 2008: ... I guess I would suggest you have at least two people that have access to the domain username, account number and password information. We were eventually able to get it from Suzi's son but it took a long time due to computer issues and the obvious need for him to deal with her death before getting to admin kinds of things. Note that for our URL we have an account name & passoword and we have an admin account for the webmaster to use - not the same passwords ... Jan

3. Division of labor in maintenance of web site. One item resolved: Frank Cox indicates he can update the web site without the need for an up-to-date version of Dreamweaver or similar software. One item on hold pending ARARA Board decision: The chair proposes to begin with Frank carrying responsibility for updating the Operational Procedures Manual, as soon as the ARARA Board certifies which officer(s) can supply these documents to the Web Committee. (By decision of the ARARA Board in Farmington NM in 2008, only the President can supply these documents to the Web Committee, but none have been supplied in that way.)
     When more than one individual has responsibility for managing the web site, there is an important goal of maintaining consistency across individuals, so one does not insert a modification into an older version of a file, thereby nullifying the work of another. The Web Committee chair here proposes that we approach this slowly and carefully, at first with an abundance of caution and safeguards, so individuals have responsibilities for updating distinct web pages or files. With such walls between areas, the problems just mentioned cannot easily arise. There do exist quite elaborate content management systems, but we have as yet no obviousl need for that level of complexity. The chair has experience with WestHost's "FormMail" utility, the incompleteness of its documentation and both incompleteness and self-contradictory advice from technical support personnel. With this experience, it seems doubly wise to avoid complexity unless we clearly need it. Complexity brings with it much greater costs for any changes and for keeping things up to date.

4. Developing gradually a proposal that a professional web designer may suggest to us a snazzy or elegant or (?) look and feel for the www.ARARA.org site. It is most important that ARARA members retain the role of choosing the look and feel they prefer, that this not simply be handed over to some professional whose goals may be quite incompatible with those of ARARA. Some parts of this task follow, in a first approximation to order in which they can be accomplished:
(a) Has the ARARA membership had adequate time to think whether any of the logic of the tree structure or paths to finding parts of web site content should be changed? If so, we can treat this as fixed and approved unless a web designer wishes to suggest changes via a very small example, which would need to be made accessible to the membership to evaluate before being approved across the board.
(b) The host company Westhost can provide some web site programming services at $59/hour, which is probably preferable to an expensive contract in getting some features to full functionality, if Web Committee members do not have the knowledge or skills.
(c) LINKS -- The look and feel of links are in process of modification, and this can be completed before the end of this year. For a sample of the look recommended in "Beautiful Web Design" please see the page of officers and contacts here which now implements this style. In this style, links do not have underlining, so that descenders (gjpqy) are not obscured. Underlining appears when the cursor hovers over the link, reinforcing the user's awareness. The standard color scheme is otherwise maintained (blue for links not yet visited; magenta when already visited).
(d) Order form, Field trip form -- these are in development, hopefully can be implemented before the end of the year if the Publication and Conference committees approve them.
(e) Procedures for getting samples of work by one or more web designers; letting ARARA members know how to view these and comment on them; choosing a web designer; experimenting with an initial small contract; making the first results accessible to ARARA members; points at which ARARA can suggest modifications (built into the contract); how to make decisions whether the work is satisfactory enough to adopt pilot results and proceed to further work. At all points, ARARA members remain in control of choices and decisions. Those wise in these sorts of contracts will surely be able to suggest additional safeguards and methods of development.

5. In pursuance of 4. just above, four new pages will be added to the web site shortly to accumulate suggestions and thinking relative to the long-term graphic improvement of the web site: A cover page outlining the distinct pages which follow, and:
(a) Graphic improvements currently in process (incremental).
(b) Goals we may have for an eventual design (navigation; page layouts; graphic look and feel; fonts; others?)
(c) How might graphic presentation of an ARARA web site be particularly appropriate to the subject of rock art? (currently only Chris Gralapp's design of the "sandstone" background of the home page).
(d) What web sites do we like for their graphic impression, which would work for the kinds of content and presentation we want? Examples for ARARA members to think about. It may be that no currently existing rock art web sites are the best role model for what we want to aim for. We can find good ideas from web sites anywhere. [Leigh Marymor Nov. 2008 suggested the site of the Trust for African Rock Art, perhaps for its alternating photos. Please click here for that.]
(e) What web designers have a portfolio which overall we like? (with links to their portfolio and/or to various web sites they have designed). These web designers of course need not have any particular knowledge of rock art in advance.
(f) Technical standards and "beautiful web design" -- a summary of some information from a book on this subject, as relevant to our work. This is already accessible here. www.ARARA.org/Beautiful_Web_Design.html