Under the Gun, Part 2
by Rebecca Rohan
Meet Your Deadline (instead of the executioner)
Insist Upon Consistency
Jeff De Tray, Webmaster for both I-way Magazine and
New Country Magazine, says, "If you depend on others in your organization to supply you with text and graphics, take the time to educate them about which file formats are best for you. If you're lucky, maybe they will learn to insert things like Bold and Italic tags in the material they give you, saving you lots of time. Explain GIFs and JPEGs, and ask for the resolution and size you need."
Thomas Gallagher, Online Product Manager for The Travel Channel, agrees that, depending on the media contributed, getting the proper formats can save hours or days. "Draw up a list of current content format requirements for copy, audio, graphics, video and photos, to be sent to everyone currently or planning to contribute to the site," says Gallagher. "This sounds like common sense, but you'd be surprised what you receive if you don't let folks know. Ancient versions of word processor formats in foreign languages, posters sent for images, Digital Betacam when you've got a beat-up VCR. Be very specific on what you can and can't use."
Gallagher says it's important to amend the list as your needs change. He adds that while there is some time spent hand-holding in the beginning to bring everybody in line with the standards, "It's a question of [wasting] your valuable time running around trying to convert formats when you could just 'drop it in.'"
Wayne Wong, Online Services Director at PhotoDisc (www.photodisc.com), says "Once you come up with a design style guide, you can have more hands working on the project." Wong adds that once the design style guide is in place, "You can create automated systems that are extensible."
Christina Craft, Chief Web Publisher at Corel Corporation, recommended "Since there are sometimes between five and seven people working on our web pages at any one time, it is important to keep [file] naming conventions and strict publishing standards. This way anyone, at any time, can find a document or file for updating, and everyone knows what to do with that file."
Recycle, Revise, Re-Use Content and Code
Catholic Online has volunteers, mostly senior citizens, who answer e-mail questions about the faith from their homes (The most frequent questions, thousands per week, are about particular saints). The volunteers combine and paraphrase answers from approved sources and answer each question, while sending a cc: to Catholic Online. Catholic Online converts each answer to HTML and puts the information in the appropriate area of the Web site--for example, under "Saints." This cuts down the response time for future e-mail, and helps build a vast archive of information for the Web site, according to Michael Galloway, President of Catholic Online.
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