The purpose of this page is to provide some guidelines to the parish staff that will help them keep the website information fresh and up-to-date.
Most of the content on this website is static, and does not need to be changed very often. It can be updated on an as-needed basis by contacting Gil Hennon, our webmaster:
Simply send Gil an email with the revision or change you want to make, and he should be able to make the change fairly easily. The HTML code for this website is documented throughout, with commentary that explains how and where to make changes.
At the same time, some of the information needs to be updated frequently so that it remains current. What follows is a general outline that will do just that if it is followed. It is designed to be implemented with a minimum amount of effort.
This version of our website has been designed with a few basic principles in mind:
- It should be clean and easy to read.
- The most commonly sought information should be easy to find on the front page and on every page. Namely, that means the parish phone number and address, the mass times, and priest's names.
- Every page and every linked file should be small in terms of file-size. Not everyone in the world has high-speed internet, and people get easily frustrated when pages take too long to download.
- It should be possible to adjust the layout, colors, fonts, etc. universally for all pages instead of page by page. For this reason, there is a "Cascading Style Sheet" file called style.css.
- For the sections of each page that are the same for every page, like the navigation menu, the header, and the footer, it should be possible to make changes only once, instead of page by page. For this reason, simple java-scripts that are easy to update and change and maintain control the common parts of the website.
The parish bulletins in both English and Spanish should be uploaded to the website every week. You can create the bulletins in any format you like, and then convert them to PDF file using the free version of PDF Redirect. When you give the new PDF files their names, use "bulletin.pdf" for English, and "bulletin_es.pdf" for Spanish.
Then email both files every week to our webmaster Gil Hennon, who will place them in the /docs/ directory.
The "Announcements" page is actually located on another website. It is a blog hosted for free by Wordpress. Updating the "Announcements" page should be a part of the weekly bulletin routine. And if there are other announcements or news that the pastor wants to share, it doesn't have to wait until the bulletin is ready. You can add announcements any time you like.
Because the blog is free, there are limitations to the colors, layout, fonts, etc. The parish's username is has limited access privileges to keep things easy to manage. If there is a need to change the layout or format in the future, please contact Vita Mea for assistance.
These are the steps for creating an online announcement on the parish web page.
- Click here to log into the page for creating a new "post." (If you want, you can save the page as a "Favorite" in your web browser.)
- Log in with the username and password. Since this page is public, that information is not here, but the Parish Secretary has the log-in information. The blog's log-in information should be kept private to avoid having it defaced.
- Type something in the "Title" box. For instance "CYO Meeting This Week" or "Announcements for August 5, 2007" or whatever you like.
- Type or paste the announcement information into the "Post" box.
- OPTIONAL: In the column on the right, you can select a "Category" for this announcement. If you don't, it will automatically list the announcement as "Misc."
- Click on the "Publish" button.
- You're done.
A page has been set up so that people who are altar servers, lectors, cantors, etc. can download the current schedule. Of course, that's only helpful if the current schedule is actually upoaded. If you email them to Gil Hennon, he can upload them to the /docs/ folder.
For the sake of keeping the files small, you should try saving your schedules as electronic documents using the .RTF (rich-text file) format. In most word processors, like Word or WordPerfect, when you are saving a file, you have the option to "Save As." When you use that option, you can select the file format. The .RTF format will preserve most of your formatting information (like fonts and tabs and spacing), while creating a very small file that can be opened and viewed by any word processor.
Likewise, you can also save your files in the PDF format using the free version of PDF Redirect. Gil can adjust the links on the Ministry Schedules page accordingly.