Is your webmaster feeling the pressure of being the single point of contact for website updates? Do your members go to the website looking for answers to a few simple questions only to find archived PDF newsletters from the early 2000s? Even if you answered no to both of these questions, a website design with a collaboration-enabled content management system can help you serve local members and also share the tasks of writing new and updating current content.

Fortunately, there are web content management systems available to webmasters to help effectively manage a local STC website when your members’ expectations for a website are reaching new heights every year. This article shares the research that a small team did while working on a redesign of the STC Austin web site in the summer of 2007.

Design priorities

Before discussing the technology, be sure that you have studied the needs that your website meets. In our case, we wanted to address three items as priorities:

• Posting jobs and resumes
• Updating meeting and event information
• Sharing contact information for the officers

We looked at our logs and statistics for the web site (knowing full well that web stats are an inexact science) and backed up our priorities with statistics analysis. The only additional detail we found was that site visitors read a salary survey report and a listing of technical publications agencies quite often so we knew those had to be included going forward. We made our top priority providing continually updating information for job seekers.

Budgeting for website needs

We also had our past year’s budgets available and also looked for areas where website features could save money in others’ budgets. An example is the annual local salary survey we conduct, which cost the chapter $120 a year in the past. If a web-based survey could save some money in that area, we wanted to be sure to try to design that into the site. Part of analyzing the budget was looking at the amount of bandwidth necessary to ensure the same level of service to the web site visitors.

Researching CMS technology

Next I sat down and looked through more than a dozen local STC community sites to look for trends and observe designs that I liked and found useful.

Based on reading http://stcforum.org/viewtopic.php?id=117 and http://stcforum.org/viewtopic.php?id=785 plus doing some investigation of other chapter’s websites on my own, I gathered that other chapters have used these CMSes.

• North Carolina STC at http://www.stc-carolina.org uses Tiki Wiki from http://tikiwiki.org/
• Indiana STC at http://www.stc-indiana.org/ uses Expression Engine from http://www.pmachine.com/
• Iowa STC at http://stc-desmoines.org uses Plone from http://www.plone.org
• STC France at http://www.stcfrance.org/ uses Drupal from http://www.drupal.org

I noticed that many local communities have started using WordPress from http://wordpress.org for their website. While WordPress is typically associated with blogging software, it is also a decent CMS. Posts are typically displayed in journal fashion with the time/date stamp dictating the display, but WordPress also has page management and plug-ins that let you use it in a CMS manner. The WordPress sites that caught my eye are:

• Hyperviews Online (this site)
• http://www.stc-suncoast.org/
• http://www.stcalaska.org/

Having used WordPress for my blog at www.justwriteclick.com and thinking it would work well for multiple contributors on a geographic community web site such as STC Austin, I decided to focus my attention on the how and why of a WordPress implementation. My basic knowledge of WordPress was that there’s a wordpress.org, where you download and install your own installation of WordPress and any plugins you need, and there’s wordpress.com, where you can set up a blog quickly but you cannot install plugins.

Surveying web masters who use WordPress

Armed with my tiny bit of knowledge about WordPress (the .com variety, not .org), I emailed the web masters for the WordPress sites and asked them the following questions:

1. Did you set it up as a group blog so that officers can write and publish their own pages?
2. Is it a hassle to manage permissions for users?
3. Do you need certain WordPress plugins (thereby not allowing us to use hosted WordPress at wordpress.com)
4. What do you accomplish with the plugins?
5. What’s the most difficult thing to accomplish with Wordpress for your current website goals?
6. What areas or functionality do you feel are lacking?
7. How much involvement do you have with multiple content editors?
8. How difficult was it to train others to use WordPress?
9. Can you outline the general design you took when starting out with WordPress? What have you added on later?
10. What other CMSes were on your radar?

Here is a summary of the resulting information gathered from this informal survey.

Group blogging and managing permissions for users

Everyone had set up their WordPress site as a group blog, and said that permissions are quite easy with WordPress. People described two basic approaches. One is to have one or two editors who are the only ones given permission to publish content. The second approach is to give everyone that contributes content the ability to publish that content. One downside to the first approach that a site administrator noted is the lack of an email notification so that contributions being saved would automatically trigger an email notification to the person with publishing permissions. There’s a WordPress plugin for that, but in their particular case, it would have required an update of the underlying WordPress software to use a compatible plug-in.

To others, the difficulty in the second approach (allowing everyone to publish) mostly centers on getting enthusiastic and consistent contributors.

WordPress plugins

Tom Johnson gave a very helpful list of WordPress plugins that he uses for the http://www.stc-suncoast.org/ site.

Examples of uses for WordPress plugins are tasks like spam control, displaying event calendars, and RSS feed management. I’ve included links to each of the plugins’ sites for easier viewing and downloading.

Spam control: Bad Behavior, Akismet, and Spam Karma (”Activate all 3 and spam disappears,” says Tom.)

Show inbound links to your web site: Kramer

Protect email addresses from spam: Obfuscate Email

Show most popular posts: Popularity Contest

Show related posts: Related Posts

Ease of configuring sidebars: Samarsin PHP widget

Show people who have commented the most: Show top commentators

Show advanced toolbar for editing content: Visualize Advanced Features,

RSS feed management: Subscribe to comments

Basic and overall site administration: WordPress database backup, All-in-one SEO pack

Multimedia: Podpress, Video plugin

Events and calendars: Event calendar and widget, Evermore

Content management: List subpages, Table of contents generator, and WP-table

For a list of all the Wordpress plugins, go to: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/.

What was most difficult to accomplish with WordPress?

Even backup is easy with WordPress, so most major administrative tasks are not difficult. Listservs are typically separate from the web site, so the disconnect between an email-based system and an RSS or blog-notification system is apparent, and you do not know which one ensures that everyone in the chapter gets certain postings or notifications. So it is not easy to push notifications using WordPress alone.

Functions that WordPress lacks and managing multiple contributors

Some web masters found that member participation is the most difficult to accomplish but know that is not related to the Wordpress tool. However, participation is critical to the success of a content management system if you want the content to be contributed by everyone. So your community culture is a factor in setting up a CMS-based web site if you want other officers or members to contribute content.

Training others to use WordPress

No training was needed for the editor and content addition tools, other than ensuring that authors do not paste in existing “bad” HTML code such as that generated by Word. A training session sounded like a good idea although no one had held one yet.

For the SunCoast community, job opportunities are the most frequently posted items, and the employment manager posts those, so it was important to insure that the other officers are ready and willing to use WordPress to post new opportunities.

General website design tips

Ann Wiley had the good advice to “Use the default, because it’s closest to the Xerox Publishing Standards and the least work to use for multiple sites. When designing your STC community website, include the required and recommended items in the STC Newsletter Competition guidelines.” You could use those guidelines for your outline if you were stumped for other ideas.

CMS choices besides WordPress

As the list above shows, many other STC communities are using other CMSes such as Drupal, Plone, Tiki Wiki, Expression Engine, and Joomla. Destry Wion, a web designer at http://wion.com, wrote about selecting an open source CMS at Hyperviews Online that also serves as a good reference.

Merging design and content management to meet your goals

By keeping your members goals in mind, you can ensure that your website has current updated content that is managed and backed up and contributed by many instead of a few using WordPress or another content management system. While we eventually selected Joomla as our CMS for our new (unfinished) site at www.stc-austin.org, the research I did for WordPress implementations should be helpful to anyone beginning to consider using a CMS for maintaining their STC community website.

In this issue, Geoff Hart reports on numerous sessions at the 2007 STC annual conference, and Jean Hollis Weber has an article on ethics in scientific and technical communication. There is a book review on writing in the health professions by past STC president David Armbruster.

Editor Geoff Hart was elected an STC Fellow in 2007. Congratulations, Geoff.

Each issue is announced to SIG members, and the current issue is available on the SIG website for members only (you enter your member number and password). The second quarter 2007 issue has just been posted. It includes a report from the conference by the SIG manager, volunteer opportunites, volunteer news, a profile of a member who works in the financial services sector, and a feature by past SIG manager Audrey Kessler on use of graphics in policies and procedures.

The newsletter archive is at http://www.stcsig.org/pp/newsletter/index.php

Carolina Chapter. Communique. This online newsletter has its own site, http://stc-carolina.org/newsletter/tiki-index.php The home page lists the contents of the most recent issue, and there is an archive of past issues. It is easy to print all or some of the articles in each issue, and to search for articles on a topic. There is an RSS feed. You can rate articles and discuss them. Don’t miss “Is Technical Writing Your Calling” in the Carolina Communique for first quarter 2007: http://stc-carolina.org/newsletter/tiki-index.php?page=Pith+and+Vinegar%3A+Is+Technical+Writing+Your+Calling%3F June 7, 2007.

Northeast Ohio Chapter. Lines and Letters. A summary of the newsletter is emailed to members and the newsletter editors’ list, and the full issue is posted on the web. The June issue is at http://www.neostc.org/lines/#story4 The chapter is hosting a regional conference in the fall: http://www.neostc.org/lines/#story3 Chapter members have reported their experiences at the STC Annual Conference: http://www.neostc.org/lines/#story18 June 17, 2007.

Orange County Chapter. TechniScribe. The current issue and back issues are accessible from http://www.ocstc.org/newsltr.asp This is a traditional newsletter published as a navigable PDF. Chapter members receive a printed copy and the current issue is uploaded at the same time. The chapter posts a link on the Newsletter Editors’ list. The June 2007 issue has an excellent summary of the STC Annual Conference from the viewpoint of the incoming chapter president. June 11, 2007

Technical Editing SIG. Corrigo. The newsletter is distributed monthly to SIG members as an email summary of the articles on the SIG blog site, http://www.stc-techedit.org/ The month’s issue is also compiled in a PDF file that anyone can download: http://www.stc-techedit.org/newsletter/newsletter-archives/ The April, 2007 issue included “Is Consistency Boring,” http://www.stc-techedit.org/2007/04/03/is-consistency-boring/ –an article on a key aspect of reuse which appeared originally in the Carolina Communique. June 7, 2007.

Usuability and User Experience SIG. Usability Interface. The newsletter is published quarterly on the SIG website. It is announced on the SIG email list. The June, 2007 issue is posted at www.stcsig.org/usability/index.html In this issue, Alice Preston reviews Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge: http://www.stcsig.org/usability/newsletter/0706-moggridge.html June 15, 2007.

Microsoft was looking for help in planning the next generation of tools for user assistance, and seeking feedback about what’s needed in next-generation of Help and user assistance platforms, both online and client-based.

The Online SIG announced Microsoft’s survey on the SIG email list and the SIG announcement list, and encouraged a member at Microsoft to post the link on the STC Forum.

They survey was quite comprehensive, taking about 30 minutes to complete. The survey asked what UA technologies people are using, what features they’d like to see in a Help or UA system, and what they’d like to see in the future.
Microsoft received an excellent response, and sent this acknowledgement of the help from the Online SIG.

“Microsoft would like to thank STC’s Online SIG for the great response to our user assistance survey. It was a long, detailed survey and we appreciate your time. Your input will be a primary source of data as we are planning for the next generations of the Windows Help system as well as other user assistance platforms.”

Our next email renewal notice is scheduled to go out on January 9, and the next postal mail notice goes out on January 29.

The Corporate Value Program (CVP) offers a variety of options, tailored to meet organizations’ technical communication needs. Companies can choose between memberships for all the staff or just a few.

The benefits include: E-memberships for company employees; transferable membership, if employees leave the company; special CVP rates on select STC goods and services (not available to employees directly); special CVP rates on training and education offerings; eligibility to introduce the organization’s products/services/events to STC members; recognition on STC’s CVP web page and on STC’s homepage – and more. More information on the Corporate Value Program is available on STC’s website.

The conference takes place May 13 - 16, 2007 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.

The closing speaker is Ze Frank, a high-tech humorist.

The photo gallery at www.stc-cdx.org/gallery has photos of both speakers.