-- 31 Days Until Relay --
 
The Relay was progressing, our team members were out there in web-land, but they had no compelling reason to come to our site. Pretty much the same was true for all the groups I mentioned earlier. It was time to give them what they needed...
 
Ya gotta have tools, and ya gotta know how to use them. So, after Convio training delivered by Elise (our outstanding ACS Community Rep) I immediately created a "Forms" section on the Navigation Bar, uploaded some forms to the Event Library, and set about hooking them up. Easier said than done... It's apparent that Convio's support for creating links on the Nav Bar is oriented toward linking to pages, not documents. No problem: I discovered the method in the "Insert a Document into an Email" pdf (look under Online Chair & Event Manager "How To's"), which describes how to assemble the necessary URL string.
 
However, it wasn't long before the Nav Bar was good and long, and I was growing tired of building that string every time I added a new document. The Event Management Center (EMC)  presents a method for managing a library of documents, but Convio provides no tool for presenting them. I finally got the hint: I needed a "forms" page. Time to build a page!
 
I assembled a basic custom "Forms" page, linked it from the Nav Bar, deleted all those old links, and never looked back. I built a similar page for documents. This made a lot more sense... Still, it would be nice to see support for linking docs from the Nav Bar, as is available in the WYSIWYG editor's link tool.
 
One note about documents: I reasoned that if a form or document is intended to be edited, then it's best to leave it in its native format... Word or Excel in our case. However, if it can be read-only, it's better to convert it to Adobe Acrobat pdf, so that a wider range of users can open it. Fortunately, I have access to Acrobat and can do the conversions. Adobe does offer free conversions on-line, but I believe this is limited to three documents per registration. It would be nice to see a native-to-pdf conversion tool right inside EMC...
 
Another early addition was a photo of last year's survivor lap, added to the Greeting page. This is fun for the Relayers, and gives some hint to the general public as to what a Relay For Life event looks like. Adding the image was relatively easy, and is documented in the pdf help files.
 
Next was a photo gallery of last year's relay. Embedding the gallery is documented in the How-To's, and PhotoBucket cooperates nicely. I've seen other photo sites used to host as well, so I'd be interested to learn what other ROCs are doing.
 
The site hit a new level of slick (at least to me) once I got our calendar going. One of the How-To files describes the process of embedding a Google calendar, and it works like a charm. We decided to share access with all the team captains, with the intent that they would make entries for fundraisers and/or team meetings. I handed out instructions for doing this at the next team captains meeting, and published them on the site as well.
 
More next time!
 
Jon Reynolds
Website Chair, Relay For Life of Greene County

 


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jonnymac – May 12, 2009 – 10:22pm