Opportunities and Challenges for Community Webmasters

Community Websites: Commonly Misunderstood

Are we nuts?

Additional resources

By Adam Gaffin
Boston Online

You want to set up a Web site to serve your community. Obviously, one of the most important things you'll need is content - information about your town or neighborhood. Here's a guide to finding and developing content for your site. Like Sears, we'll start with Good, move onto Better and then finish with Best.

Good

Tip:

Here are some resources to get you started: Boston Yahoo Has lots of links for Boston-area communities. AltaVista Unless you live in a town with an odd name, use its Help page to learn how to narrow your search! School district profiles Has descriptions of every school system in the state.

Let's start with the easy part - creating an information gateway. You might want your site to become known as the place to go when

Example:
Brookline Online's People page is a listing of local residents with home pages, collected in part through Yahoo and AltaVista searches.

somebody wants information about your town. Fortunately, there's likely already a vast amount of information about your community on the Web - your goal is to find these documents and then organize them into some rational and easy-to-navigate fashion (sort of like Yahoo).

So call up all the major search engines and type your community's name in the search field. If you're lucky, you live in a place with a relatively uncommon name, so most of the hits will be relevant. If you live in a place with a common name, however, you'll get tons of hits that have nothing at all to do with your specific locale. Here's where you get creative with your search. Try adding your state name to the search, for example, on Altavista, type something like:

Tip:
It's a good idea to check your links every so often to make sure they still work. NetMechanic is a free service that will try all the links on your site, then tell you which ones are broken.

Each search engine has a different way of maximizing your results; spend a couple of minutes with their Help pages. When you're done, repeat the search for local landmarks, churches, residents, anything and anybody in your town or neighborhood that might possibly be of interest.

So now you've collected all these links. You've organized them into different categories or even pages.

And what do you have? A mini-Yahoo is what. Now, there's nothing wrong with that - Yahoo shows the value of such an information gateway.

But there are a couple of questions to ask. First, is there already such a Web site in your community? If so, do you want to duplicate somebody else's effort? Perhaps more important, does such a link compilation really reflect what's unique or interesting or fun about your community? If you stripped out the town name, could somebody tell by looking at your site where it's located? It's time to consider moving to the Better approach...

Better

Example:
The Concord Magazine is an entire site devoted to essays and articles about that historic town.

Now branch out from there. What would you tell neighbors who just moved in next door about your town? What would you recommend to them if they asked where they could get some good Chinese food - or wallpaper? Where's the train station, the library, the laundromat? What's a good bar? Think of all the questions a newcomer might ask you, then answer them. Don't be afraid to be opinionated. Again, turn this into HTML. Voila! Another unique resource.

Example:
The Beginner's Guide to Roslindale is a series of tips a long-time resident might give to a newcomer.

What about those relatives you have coming in for a couple weeks this summer? Where will you take them? What in the world are you going to do with them for two whole weeks? Write those answers down and, well, by now you should be getting the idea.

Once you've done things like this, you might want to think about expanding out past your own knowledge and opinions.

A good place to start is the local library and historical society. A lot of people love reading about the history of their town, even if they no longer live there. Most libraries and historical societies will have tons of documents and photographs that, with a little work, you could turn into a series of interesting Web pages.

Example:
The Wicked Good Guide to Bizarro Boston is a sort of anti-tourism guide.

At this point, you might want to think about who might be visiting your site. There are people who already live in town, people who used to live there, people who are thinking of moving there. Each group might want to see different things on a Web site. Is your community a tourist attraction? There's another group. Try to think "outside the box." Anybody can put together a quickie guide to well known attractions. But what about offbeat things that might not be in your average Fodor's? How about a guide to public restrooms or the best place to park near the beach?

Example:
Boston Cityscapes shows thumbnails in action.

But back to photos for a second. How do you get them online? If you don't have access to a digital camera or a scanner, you can use a regular 35-mm camera - many Kodak film processors can now turn film into CDs with images that you can then edit in a graphics editor such as Paint Shop Pro. Also, be careful with photos because they can dramatically increase the amount of time it takes users to download pages (especially color photos). One way to deal with this is to put small "thumbnail" versions of the photos - with links to larger versions for people who want to see them.

Example:
The Webmaster of the Waltham community Web page kept getting questions about Waltham watches, so he wrote a Waltham Watch FAQ.

As people come to your site, they're going to ask questions: Whatever happened to Joe's Diner, can you send me tourism brochures, can you look up my friend Mabel whom I haven't seen in 25 years?

It's time to write an FAQ - answers to frequently asked questions - about your town.

Got an election coming up? Try to get the candidates to e-mail you their position papers, and then put those up. Town Meeting? Find one or two controversial topics, then ask people on either side to write their positions.

Best

Good Web sites are like the communities they cover - in flux, changing, growing.

Once you've set up the core components of your site, where do you go from there?

One answer is to continue soliciting essays and graphics from members of the community. When somebody writes you to ask how come your site doesn't have anything about X or Y or Z, ask them if they'd be willing to write up something on it. Not everybody will take you up on it, but some will.

Tip:
Guestbooks.net provides guestbooks that require no programming - just fill out an online form, then add the appropriate HTML to your page.

But more than that, you might want to start fostering a sense of community focused around your Web site. You want people to come back and share their ideas and thoughts about the town and where it's going. You want to make your site interactive - where people can spontaneously drop off ideas and know they can find a discussion or two about your town.

You want to add interactivity. There are several ways to do this. The simplest and easiest is to set up a ''guestbook.'' This is software that lets visitors to your site post a short message - and see what others have written - just like the guestbooks you see at certain tourist attractions.

If you know what you're doing there are guestbook applications you can install on your Web server. But if you're not a Unix fan, there are also Web sites that let you use a copy of their guestbooks - usually for free, although in exchange, you'll find their ads at the top of your own guestbook.

Another way is to set up a mailing list. Once that's done, the list pretty much runs itself - when somebody sends a message to it, it's automatically re-distributed to everybody else on the list. It's also a good way to encourage folks to visit your site again - whenever you add a new feature, you just send an e-mail message to everybody on the list. There is a technical issue - if your ISP does not offer mailing lists to its users (fortunately, many do), they can be hard to set up.

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Computer Conferencing on the Web lists all sorts of conferencing apps, from free to expensive. Assembly lets you set up a conference by filling out an online form - no programming required.

You could also set up a forum on your site. These better conferencing software sort of combines the best of guestbooks and mailing lists - they make it easy for visitors to post messages but they then organize those messages into topics or "threads."

As with guestbooks, if you're comfortable with such things as cgi-bin, you can set up your own conferences. Prices range from free to $1,000.

One of the problems with conferences is that it's easy to run amok at first - you could set up dozens of conferences on every topic under the sun. Resist that temptation! Otherwise, you'll wind up with lots of forums with no messages in them. Many readers just won't post messages in an empty conference - it's sort of like a 7th-grade dance.

Instead, start slowly. Open up a single conference on a very specific topic (a controversial development proposal, say). ''Seed'' the conference with some introductory messages about the topic. Promote it in any appropriate Usenet newsgroups or mailing lists. And make sure to have a prominent link to the conference high up on your home page - people won't participate if they can't find it.