Boys and Girls Club Website Project

Goals of the project:

• We can make a lot of information available online and make HBGC and its members known all over
• We all can learn how to make web pages. How simple it is to learn the technology behind creating a website
• We all can learn the process that goes behind the making a website. The process, similar to the one used by big corporations when they make their websites
• We can involve all staff members and all kids in the club. Everyone can contribute to making our website a big hit.

The plan to make the site will approximately look like the following:

1. Design phase – to design the content of the site

2. Developing phase – to develop the web pages that constitute the site

3. Hosting phase – to put the site on the internet

4. Operations – assigning responsibilities for maintenance of the site

Design phase

In design phase we will look for Excitement, Involvement and Ideas

We will discuss -

How to generate excitement among the kids – how to communicate about the project

How to involve everyone

More the involvement, more is the contribution

More is the contribution, more is the ownership

More is the ownership, better and easier it is to run and maintain

How to gather all the ideas that everyone comes up with

Some steps that we will take are:

We will make a Guiding team – a group of enthusiasts that will help the club web site project all along the way. Members of the guiding team will:

they will own the content,

they will conduct Idea sessions,

they will communicate to everyone about the project and help in generating interest,

they will manage and delegate development work,

they will learn and teach how to make the web pages and when the site is made,

they will help finding volunteers and organize the web maintenance team.

We will decide on the size of the team. An ideal team will have members with representation from all ages/groups/responsibilities.

We will organize ‘Ideas sessions’, where groups of staff members, and groups of kids will come up with ideas of things they would wish to see on their club’s website. Everyone is free to participate and give ideas in the sessions. There are no bad ideas. Every idea is noted down. Ideas could be about what to put up (content) or how it will look like (presentation e.g. colors, fonts etc.)

We will find out what is the best way to organize the groups, may be, by age groups for kids and one session with all staff members. We will decide on how/when the sessions will be conducted.

We will collect all these ideas and then organize them into website sections. This is like deciding what chapters of the book we will have, book being the website. We can think of assigning ‘owners’ or people/groups to different sections, who will then develop the pages as well as maintain them in the future.

Then we will do the Creative phase. Here we decide on the look and feel of the web site and we will draw the web pages on paper. Here too we can involve a lot of people. The owners can draw the sections them selves or take help of others. Then we will link the pages – where will the link of this page be or how the site will be navigated.

This will complete the design phase.

Development phase

In this phase, we will look for volunteers who will make the web pages using the computers in the computer lab. Here we will try to expand the knowledge of developing the web pages to as many staff and kids as possible. In the process, everyone will learn using computers and web pages. Here again, we will try to involve as many people as possible.

There are many ways to develop the pages. We can let the owners make their sections of the web site or make fresh groups.

To impart the technical knowledge, we can train one or more members of each group on how to make web pages. They can then train their teams to develop the pages and lead to make the pages.

A lot of interesting concepts come in developing a website like:

What / how many colors should we use? Does a very colorful site look good?

What should be the font size? Very big/ small?

How big should the pictures be?

What technology should we use?

How much information should we put on one page?

Etc… etc…

Once the pages are made, we will link them together to make the website.

Hosting phase

In this phase we will transfer the website from our local computers to some internet location. Once this is done, web site will be functional!!

We will encourage all the kids to ask their friends/parents to take a look.

Operations phase

In this phase, we will define operations on how to keep the website maintained and updated.

The owners of the site could keep updating their sections. They can learn how to make changes and upload the changed webpage to the website.

We will ask for suggestions/changes and we will make encourage team members to make the changes.