Chris Guld is back on the road, but this time, in a new motorhome!  Compared to their previous 30 foot/no slides home for the past 8 years, Chris says this one is a palace!  It should be called a motor mansion instead of a motorhome.  It’s a 2007 Gulf Stream Endura Diesel, Class C, 37 ft with 2 large slideouts.  

Chris and her husband, Jim travel the country giving computer seminars on digital photos, blogging, Facebook, GPS, and other topics of interest to travelers.  Their first ‘Gig’ was in Bowling Green, Kentucky.  Next they were asked to present at Lazydays RV in Tampa.  Since they couldn’t get there in person, they will be presenting the seminar remotely, using Skype’s video-teleconferencing and screensharing.  Let’s follow them on Facebook (www.facebook.com/geeksontour) to see how it goes!

Chris’s (aka Mrs. Geek) dreams have come true!  Google is flying her and her husband, Jim, out to their headquarters in Mountain View, California – better known as The Googleplex!  She will be speaking on a panel for an internal meeting of Google Support Services.  She will also be co-hosting a Webinar (seminar delivered over the Web) on using Picasa.  Picasa is a free program from Google for managing all your digital photo needs.  Chris has been teaching this program for many years and has video tutorials on her website: www.geeksontour.com

If you take digital photos, you really should take advantage of this free webinar and see our very own webmaster, Chris Guld, playing in the big league!  Here’s the link to register for the November 12 webinar.

With so many new members, I feel an introduction is in order: I’ve been a member of WEC since 1983, I joined when my business, Computer Savvy, was brand new.  WEC helped me from the startup phase, growth, and eventually selling of that business.  I am now traveling the country with my husband, Jim, in our motorhome and I have another business called Geeks on Tour. I plan to spend the winter in Fort Lauderdale this year, so I hope to be active in the club then.

I’ve always been in the Computer training and support field and I have seen it as my duty to the women of WEC to help them use computer technology to the benefit of the club.  In the 80s I took the membership data from a spreadsheet to a database so we could track member history, attendance, and the like.  In the 90s, when the web began, I made sure WEC had a website.  And, sometime after 2000, I took the printed newsletter to the web as well.  I also put the membership database onto the web and added programming to allow members to update their own information.  That is the private, members-only website, and it will not change.

Now it’s time to make our main, public, website interactive as well. 

This site is created using the WordPress platform.  This allows us to be much more flexible in how the content gets created.  WordPress allows us to build a website in a very modular fashion.  Every piece of the content can stand on its own .. one post, one page, one link.  The WordPress platform is what puts it altogether.  The entire system is web-based. 

At first, I will be the only one that actually uploads the content.  But, we will be looking for members who want to learn (and who the board authorizes), and I can teach them how to add/edit/delete pages and posts as well.  Eventually, this can be a group effort and you won’t even need me.  As a teacher, I’ve always seen it as success when my clients don’t need me anymore!

The Top Menu

Take a look the top menu.  It starts with ‘Home’, then ‘About WEC’, ‘Calendar’, and ‘Newsletters.’  If you just point and hover over ‘About WEC’ you will see two submenu items: Membership and Programs.  Also hovering over Newsletters will give you May 2009 and June 2009.  Everything you access by that main menu is in ‘Pages.’  Try clicking around and checking things out. 
8/1/9: this has changed somewhat already.  Please take  look a the current menu items and leave a comment to this page about what you think the menu items should be.

The Latest News Page

This is the blog part.  This center-content portion of the Home page consists of ‘Posts.’  WordPress is a blogging software and usually the main content is contained in dated posts.  This ‘message from your webmaster’ is a post – but I’ve made it private.  I also have included a few member profiles from past newsletters as ‘posts’ just for example purposes.

I’m not sure yet how this will shake out.  Eventually we may be able to do away with the formal monthly newsletter and just have ongoing ‘Latest News Posts.’  But I don’t want to start out that way.  Our newsletter is too valuable, and members have gotten so accustomed to submitting information for the monthly newsletter – I don’t want to mess with that!  What do you think?  Use the comments feature on this post to leave your opinion. 

I think members might also be interested in having a post of their own – they could have a personal post and a business post.  The beauty of posts is that they can be categorized and have multiple keywords (tags) attached to them – this makes our information very searchable.  They would probably submit these posts to me or some newly designated website editor.  You could charge a fee for the business profile.  Notice all the ‘tags’ already at the very bottom of the website.  Click on any one and you’ll see all the posts with that tag.

The Right Sidebar

There are so many things that can go into the sidebar.  What I’ve started with is links.  At the very top is Categories of posts, then links to other WEC pages – the Members-only site and the Photo Album.  Then, there are members’ businesses, then there are other links submitted by members.  The board should discuss what fee should be charged for these links, if any.  Keep looking down the sidebar and you see ‘Archives.’  This is an automatic organization of posts by the date they were published.  You will also see ‘Tags.’  These are the keywords that are attached to any given post.  Any post can have any number of Tags. Click on one tag, and you’ll see all the posts associated with it. 

Bottom

The footer of the page is similar to the right sidebar in that special things can go there.  Right now, ‘Recent Comments’ is at the left.  Tags are in the middle.  This is all the tags which have been applied to posts.  Click on the tag for ‘hairdresser’ for example, and you’ll be taken to whatever post was tagged with that word.  The ‘meta’ at the right is for me and whoever else starts editing the site – clicking on Admin takes you to the backoffice of WordPress, where we can write/edit/delete posts/pages or change options for the sidebar or footer etc.

Comments

Please try leaving a comment, even if you don’t know what to say, just to get the hang of it.  I think this could become a wonderful communication tool for the club.