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The First Generation....
The original web site was created in 1999 by Dave Nordell. Just as it was begining to take shape he was called home by our Lord to work on a Web Site in the "city with streets of gold". We miss him, and his efforts were lost, because domain names, hosting access, and site content were unable to be salvaged due to the loss of user-id's and passwords.
The Second Generation....
The pieces were picked up by Lynn Crawford and a new site began to emerge in early 2002. It was quickly discovered that one person could not keep the site current without help from others in our very active club.
The Third Generation....
Lynn and Phil Johnson returned to the drawing board and designed an ASP based site that could be updated (independently) by volunteers with specific club responsibilities. We wanted to control the look and feel and the navigation aspects of the site while allowing the page content to be changed by designated page authors. To avoid another loss a "time capsule" of critical "take over" information has been prepared and is locked away with the club archives. The new site was launched in November of 2002. It is currently maintained by over 20 page authors. We believe this is absolutely key to maintaining a dynamic site. The constantly changing content results in a site that visitors return to frequently to see "what's happening". The next major change was to modify the site navigation to reduce un-necessary "up and down paging" to view the pages of the site. We began using popup menus to enable direct navigation. In the process we moved to a database approach to the individual page content. The resultant site is a single "page" who's content (and other changeable information) is stored in a database and selected by URL attributes. This site went live May 1, 2003. A newly created "club master calendar" was added May 20th to allow our club members to better track the opportunities provided by this very active club. April 26, 2004 a group of those interested in expanding the site meet to discuss options. Out of this meeting came a new steering committee which will provide oversight guidance to the ever expanding Club Web site. A decision to re-establish page author assignments and encourage incresed frequency of changes will be implemented over this summer. A page of "member personal web links" has ben added to the expanded "Web Links" section in the public area of the site.
The Fourth Generation....
Early in 2005 a rebuild of he site using new technology was started using ASP.NET. The major objectives were to allow quick changes to the overall web site appeareance. To further isolate and improve page navigation and simplify author editing. A new menu provider was selected, and a content management system was added to eliminate (reduce) page authors need to know HTML. The look and feel of the site was parameterized allowing significant re-styling to occur either quarterly or monthly. The new site completely seperates content management from styling considerations. New features are: site maps
photo galleries slide shows
Technology news feeds
Leisure World manor maps
LW Newspaper PDF file downloads
Calendar filters
This new site went live in May of 2005 and will continue to be expanded during the summer months. Watch for these new initiatives!
A generic webmaster capability has been added and the technical documentation has been on line to simplify the transfer of webmaster responsibilities, should this become necessary. The "time capsule" has been updated to reflect this simpler method of web site transition.
And of course -- More history to come!!!
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