Why The New Look? I’d like to say it was time for a “fashion makeover” at the House of DSSF. But in reality the real reason why your club website looks so fabulous is more because we had some real problems with the overall structure of our online communications rather than because we wanted to look more chic. But we do look prettier, don’t we?
It’s actually a side benefit of moving the website over to Club Express that we got to play around with the graphics and style, thanks very much to Nick. (That boy has some real fashion sense!) Jerome built us a pretty good website that got the work done. The problem was it was built around the idiosyncrasies of Yahoo! Groups for communication. Our site did most of the heavy lifting—publishing rides, hosting our resources, showing our pictures, and partly communication and partly membership. And it was the “partly” part that got us in trouble. The details are gory, semi-impenetrable, and frankly boring. But in a nutshell trying to coordinate membership between the Yahoo! group and the website was a mountain of unnecessary work, and since access to the Yahoo! group depended on membership that put a crimp on our communications since we could no longer tweak the Yahoo! group into what we wanted. The bottom line was we couldn’t communicate with you, our members, effectively and without a ton of work. No wonder more than half the membership wasn’t accessing our Yahoo! group.
That’s all about to change with the new DSSF site because membership, communication, ride calendar, and to some extent finances are all in one place. Plus, maintaining the membership list will be mostly automatic (since you do it!) rather than cross-checking different email addresses and lists. That Yahoo! email address you had to create in order to access the DSSF group? You won’t need it any longer (at least for DSSF). Instead of wrestling with the craziness of Yahoo! groups and email, that time will be better spent keeping you up to date on club plans and events, and also for board members to actually get out and ride!
At the moment the only component that continues to exist externally is the Different Spokes ChainLetter aka “the DSSF weblog”. It’s still hosted by WordPress rather than CE. But that may change in the future.
The new DSSF site was only a twinkle in the eye until this January—basically, we got a new website after three months of off-and-on again volunteer work. Although the current and previous boards both contributed to where we are today, the heavy lifting was really done by Nick, who put a crapton of hours into designing, laying out, and getting feedback from the other board members and implementing it. The other guy who put the pedal to the metal was David Goldsmith, who put a ton of work into coordinating the transition, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s as well as making sure we didn’t have any egregious errors or oversights in the website. Many thanks to Jerome for assisting in the handoff and for many years of volunteer webmeistership.
And wait there’s more! The website is up and running but the board is working on the improvements that are yet to come…
If you haven’t yet seen the site, go there now. If you’re a current member, you should have received an email giving you temporary access to the site so you can go in, check your personal contact information and emend it, and set up your login. If you haven’t received an email message (and you’re sure you are a current member), please contact David Goldsmith or Nick Kovaleski (see the Leadership page at the site). And if you’d like to join DIfferent Spokes, go the website and click the “Membership” link.
The Chain Letter 