On Sat, 2005-10-08 at 13:28 -0700, Lennon Day-Reynolds wrote: > The website for the Bicicyle Transportation Alliance > (www.bta4bikes.org), on the other hand, is very much in need of a > makeover. The current design and functionality are very pre-dot-com > bubble: ugly, functional, and (from all appearances) completely > statically maintained.
You're going to find it rough going with the BTA, unfortunately. I have volunteered to do work for them over the years and they've never allowed me to do an overhaul on the site. The site is on someone's Macintosh and is uploaded via FTP to the server. About 3 years ago I offered to donate an extra PC, set it up with Linux and CVS so they could start to get cyclists with programming skills going on developing a new site (in PHP at the time) that would be database driven and allow them to do some content management. As it is everything is manual. Every single page is simple HTML generated by Dreamweaver. No SSI or anything. It's a mess, frankly. Not only does it look bad, but the code is absolutely atrocious. I came in and did what they'd let me do, but they said kindly that they'd prefer to wait on the overhaul because they were looking on going with one of these non-profit companies that do site design, etc. Well, it doesn't appear that that ever panned out, because the site is exactly the same. Anyway, point is, that I was very diplomatic. Very friendly. I have a good relationship with the BTA. I offered hardware and time and still they wanted to pay an outside shop to come in and redo the site and it never got done. So if someone can crack that nut, that would be a worthy cause, but it's going to take more than technical accumen. It's going to take someone who can show them there's a better way of getting things done and actually convince them that it would be a good idea for them to move on that. Preston _______________________________________________ PDXRuby mailing list [email protected] IRC: #pdx.rb on irc.freenode.net http://lists.pdxruby.org/mailman/listinfo/pdxruby
