Vineyard Website

Two young men approached me today regarding a project they’ve undertaken. Specifically, to overhaul the Windsor Vineyard’s website. The existing site was created in MSWord97, and is fairly shoddy by today’s standards. The people who would be responsible for maintaining this website have little experience doing web development. The two young men tasked with actually implementing it have heard of frontpage and html before, but never used either. Neither has any experience with image editing. I was contacted to give them a crash course in web design.

I sent them away with specific instructions to design something that looked good on paper, and not worry about how to make it on a computer yet. They don’t know what they want, and I can’t implement or suggest solutions for that.

Now I am left pondering how to propose a solution. Outsourcing the design would be good, but noone involved will be willing to give up control or pay someone else to do the work. None of the people involved stand much of a chance of learning html and css quickly, having barely any experience with the internet. I refuse to be directly involved in the design process, as I will inevitably be roped into doing decades of high-stress unpaid labour.

• Solution 1: Blog - Install a blogging package such as Serendipity or Wordpress, turn off comments, and use it as a news-article posting tool.
• Solution 2: Wiki - Install a wiki collaboration tool such as TikiWiki or PhpWiki, require authentication to edit pages, and form a small group of edit-capable people.
• Solution 3: Outsource - Hire a web maintainer guy who can take care of editing the html (not likely)

In any of these scenarios, I can see myself helping to create some magical css that they’re not allowed to touch, though I’m not certain how close that would put me to the dreaded support-tech-for-life scenario. On top of this, their current webhosting solution only provides for flat-files and a few crappy built-in cgi scripts; no PHP or MySQL services. Which means that in order to move to a blog or wiki based solution they’re need to switch hosting providers or upgrade the hosting service level, which will cost money. Shannon suggested using Blogger as the backend, pushing flat files out via FTP.