26 September 2007
WEB (Innovate07: Pre-Conference Workshop)
Today we held the second WEB workshop as a pre-conference workshop before Innovate07. Kem Meyer (Communications Director at Granger) again pulled together a captivating experience dedicated to excellent web strategy and taking a proactive approach to building your website.
"You need a paper site before you create your online site."
In other words, you need to be solid in the area of your communication/web strategy for your church or organization long before you begin working with the HTML. Get a handle on your information architecture and have a strategy for content management and the website will be the natural flow out of that. In essence it will take care of itself as long as the foundation is built correctly.
Last time I spoke during the final session on how I went from volunteer to paid staff and the various changes the website underwent along that journey. But this time we changed things up a bit. During the final session we broke it out - allowing people to choose more web strategy or a chance to get more technical. I took the techies and went to a different room for some "geek speak." We had a great time. I had no agenda other than this simple diagram but we probably could have gone on for another half hour at least. Next time I think I'll arrange the chairs in a circle rather than in rows with me at the front...
