Today was babysitting Monday for Linda and WordPress day for me.  Mike (W8XH), the current president of the South Lyon Area Amateur Radio Club (SLAARC), wants to create a new website for the club and I have offered to help.  We settled fairly quickly on using WordPress to do the work, based in part on the recommendation of Larry (K8UT), and in part on the fact that I am already using it for our website and this blog.  Larry offered to help us learn how to build and maintain the site, but did have the personal capacity to actually do the work as he is already the webmaster for a large number of websites.

Today was our first in-depth technical session.  We worked for over two hours and left with our heads spinning a bit, but that was OK.  Our main focus was a lot of the “back end” stuff.  We walked through some basic domain and web-host management issues including the use of subdomains, downloading and installing WordPress, configuring the site for easy/safe backup and new version development/testing, selecting an appropriate theme and navigation structure, selecting/installing plug-ins to add functions such as subscription, member login, and a member directory, and issues related to managing images.  We left with “homework” to complete before we meet with Larry again.

Not only do I want to help create a more responsive, attractive, and useful web presence for our ham radio club, I would like to improve our website/blog and have offered to do something similar for two other organizations related to our RVing interests.  The functionality I need to incorporate into those two websites will be very similar to what we need to do with our SLAARC website, so this was a very relevant learning opportunity for me.  I am also the current vice-president of the SLAARC, and as we all know, VPs don’t usually do much, so this was an opportunity for me to do more than just be prepared to fill in for Mike if needed.