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Last Update: by the Volunteer Coordinator

Steps for Page Development Volunteers

• Register to become a volunteer. When a request comes in that matches your skills, interest and availability, the BCN Volunteer Coordinator will call you.
• Read through the BCN Volunteer Manual and familiarize yourself with header/footer guidelines and the following guidelines for page development.
• Be familiar with instructions for publishing a website on BCN.
• Contact your organization and introduce yourself as a BCN volunteer. Arrange to meet with your contact about their web site.

• In meeting or talking with your contact consider the information that would be helpful for internal as well as external use of their site. For example, organizational brochures, events schedules and other PR pieces may be good public information for the site. In addition, you may want to develop the site to also be useful for internal purposes. For example, you might ask your contact about other organizations and information resources that are helpful to their organization and include links to those which have a web presence. You might also include long-term planning documents. We recommend that you do not commit to including short-term information such as weekly meeting agendas and minutes, unless the organization is willing to do the updates themselves.

• Be explicit about time lines and expectations regarding the project for both you and the organisation.

• Next, map out a directory and file system for the site. Please begin all files within a particular organization's directory with the same 5 letters/numbers (ie. expeople.html, exevent.html, exsite.html). These 5 letters/numbers will be the same as your DIPP prefix - keep organisation distinct in naming practices.

• For all links to your organization's home page included in other files, refer to the home page as index.html. BUT, before you use FTP to send your files to the BCN server, change the index.html file name to index.html preceded by your 5 letter/number code (ie. bcnexindex.html). We will change it back when we move the files to the appropriate directories in BCN. (If multiple home pages came in as index.html before we got a chance to move them, your home page might be copied over by another's home page file. So please make this temporary change before doing the FTP). We would prefer that you use DIPP, BCN's automatic updating process. You can also use

  For information on using FTP and FETCH, see Web FTP instructions. But this requires a volunteer to manually move the files to the proper directory and can take upto a week.

• Follow the guidelines for page format (headers and footers) and other information found in the page developement tools site. Be sure to make sure that all your links work. Any site hosted by BCN must have a logo or link back to BCN.

• Meet with your contact after you have developed the pages and/or send them a hard copy of the web pages. Ask them to review for additions or changes. Ask them for suggestions where their site should be linked on BCN. Make changes if necessary.

• Call the Volunteer Coordinator (492-8176) about the directory the files will reside in on the BCN server. You might also discuss possible links within various related centers on BCN.

• FTP your files to the usr/local/ftp/incoming directory on the BCN server. Follow these directions for sending a document to BCN. Be sure to e-mail the appropriate center developer alerting him or her to the presence of your files in the incoming ftp directory. Be sure to include within that e-mail message a list of the file names and the name of the directory where you want them moved.

• The center developer should notify you when the files have been successfully moved.

• Contact other center developers and request links if appropriate. Center Developers are listed at the bottom of each information center's home page.

• At this point, you should call or e-mail your contact to let them know that the process is complete. If they do not already know, provide them with the complete path name for their site. Also, suggest various ways for publicizing their URL (include on letterhead and brochures, e-mail other related sites outside of BCN and ask them to link to their site, etc.)
• Let BCN know you are finished with the project. Call (492-8176) or e-mail the BCN Volunteer Coordinator or fill out the volunteer hours form.