New website progress

Ever since DREAM3 announced they will no longer exist, I have been in the process of rebuilding our website from scratch with Elexio. Our current website will continue to exist as it is, but we have halted any further development in order to build our new site.

The prospect of building an entirely new site from scratch is incredibly daunting, especially since the website is just one of my responsibilities. As massive of a project as it is, I'm really excited about it because I know this new site will be great. We've designed it to be much more user friendly and it's got a fresh new look. It's still in development, but you can follow the site's progress by following this temp link.

I think Elexio, along with Intellisite, will allow us to have an excellent site without requiring a full-time web person. My role will be to oversee the sites and maintain the big stuff. However, I will rely heavily on other departments and volunteers to maintain their area's pages.

Intellisite, like DREAM3, is a WYSIWYG content management system that allows us to create and maintain the content of the site. In other words, if you know how to use MS Word, you can probably volunteer on the web team.

Unlike DREAM3, though, we get a very professional looking site - because it's designed by a professional. Not having a web person on staff, this is a huge plus and I think you'll agree the new design is coming along very well (although slowly - see below).

So far, Elexio has proven to be miles ahead of DREAM3 in several ways:

• Intellisite's content editor really works. D3 was incredibly frustrating for many reasons. What you saw was usually not what you got. It did some stuff well, but overall it was clumsy and cumbersome. Don't get me wrong - the Intellisite editor has its share of frustrations, but if you worked in D3 you will want to kiss your monitor after working in Intellisite.
• Intellisite is incredibly user friendly. The file manager is similar to Windows Explorer, and supports drag-and-drop (although I often cannot make things drop - I think it's a bug).
• The form creator is excellent
• I can set user permissions on a per page basis. If I don't grant you publisher rights to a specific area, you cannot change or create a page and post it live to the site w/o first having your changes approved by a publisher. With D3, it was all or nothing.
• I can see who changed what page when. Also, I can see past versions of pages and revert back to a previous version at any time.
• I have access to incredibly detailed site stats, i.e. how many hits & visitors, how long do visitors stay, referrers, browser information, search engine stats, etc.

Right now I'm in the process of collecting information from all the departments. I'm also waiting on the design of the main site to be completed so we can move on to our 3 youth sites and the Fairfield site.

To be honest, I'm a little frustrated because this design process has been really slow. It's been almost 2 1/2 months since our initial design meeting and I have yet to be able to revise draft number one. I know this is a really busy time at Elexio, and my designer was recently married and on his honeymoon. On top of that they are moving their offices to a new location. So, I'm being patient, but I'm beginning to get frustrated. If it's taken this long for one site, how long will 4 more take? I've emailed and called several times with no response. I signed up with Elexio long before DREAM3 officially chose them to take over their customer base. I hoped that would keep me from being just 1 of hundreds, but maybe not. I hope this is not an indication of things to come.

I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt, and I'm excited to move forward with everything.