Jim, it’s not a secret and you’re certainly free to
mention it if a member brings up to the subject, but I don’t see any
point in broadcasting it.
Dave
From: Jim Weaver K8JE
[mailto:K8JE@ARRL.org]
Sent: Friday, October 29, 2010 3:38 PM
To: arrl-odv
Subject: RE: [arrl-odv:19471] Web project status report
Dave,
First, thank you. Next, based on the assumption that the
change in management for the website project is common knowledge throughout HQ,
am I correct that it is also OK to let members know of the change?
Tnx,
Jim
Jim Weaver, K8JE, Director
ARRL Great Lakes Division
5065 Bethany Rd.
Mason, OH 45040; Tel. 513-459-1661
ARRL,
The national association for Amateur Radio
From: Sumner, Dave, K1ZZ
[mailto:dsumner@arrl.org]
Sent: Friday, October 29, 2010 2:55 PM
To: arrl-odv
Subject: [arrl-odv:19471] Web project status report
Web Project Status Report
October 29, 2010
To the Board of Directors
Last week I assumed project
leadership responsibility for completing
the implementation of the current ARRL Web site. I promised weekly reports;
here is the first.
The previous week I met
individually with most of the ARRL personnel who are involved with the project
day to day. After announcing the
change to the other department managers I called Brent Robertson of Fathom to
let him know; Brent assured me of his full cooperation and that of his firm.
Early on I came to the
conclusion that responsibility for administering the Bugzilla system used by
ARRL and Fathom to track issues in the website ought to reside in the IT
Department rather than with Katie Glass. Katie’s primary function is to
help those of us who are responsible for Web content rather than to deal with
technical issues. Katie and Jon
Bloom fully agreed, and on October 21 Jon announced to staff that Maureen
Farmer henceforth will be the principal administrator of the Bugzilla system.
Katie will still enter and update bugs when she needs to. Maureen is also now
the administrative point of contact with Fathom for bug-fix and other
programming matters. Maureen was not on staff when the new Web site was
launched but has now been here for four months; I’m glad she is able to
take this on. Maureen immediately reviewed the outstanding bugs, cleaned out a number of them and reassigned
several others. We are scheduling a meeting of ARRL IT and Fathom staff for
next week to review all open bugs and what is needed to close them out. I will
attend that meeting as part of my education but do not intend to insert myself
into the communication between the respective technical staffs at Fathom and
the ARRL.
Observant regular visitors
to the Web will have noticed that there is now a “quick link”
feature at the top of the home page that provides direct links to popular and important pages.
This was in the works already; I’m glad we were able to go live with it
this week. Another, more subtle change was made the previous week to darken the
font used for text throughout the site. Several attendees at last Saturday’s Executive Committee
meeting said they had noticed an improvement in readability.
I am still making my way up
the learning curve about the site and learn more every day. At this point my
major concerns fall into two categories:
1. Training. Overall we
have a pretty good handle on the content management system although some staff
members are more comfortable with it than others. We have the ability to
address this in-house. On the other hand, ARRL staff does not yet have as clear
an understanding as we need of how to use the administrative tools to manage,
for example, who gets to view which pages. Next week I hope to get a better
idea of how much this is a training issue and how much has to do with
deficiencies in the administrative tools themselves.
2. Siebel-to-Web (and vice
versa) data communication issues. These lie at the heart of many of our ongoing
problems and are particularly daunting because they require an in-depth
understanding of both systems. Particularly now that our two new programmers
Maureen and Dennis Budd are on staff, our IT department is coming up to speed
on the Web side.
David Sumner, K1ZZ – Chief Executive Officer
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