RuralWeb/improving websites


 * guild: beautiful websites guild

Improving websites/ webportals is one of the skills of the RuralWeb community. We have expertise in HTML, Javascript, (My)SQL and also in WordPress, Joomla, Concrete5 and Typo3.

WordPress learning project
Vision In Q1 2014 we want to start the learning circle Making Beautiful Websites (e.g. WordPress for beginners). We have set up a WordPress sandbox and contacted a professional WordPress trainer to help us with the first steps.

Participants of the learning circle are intrinsic motivated to learn, work and share about the topic. Motivation could be to learn collectively more about ICT / making websites and/or to be able to earn an income using ICT in assignment for (local) NGOs, companies or governmental bodies.

All participants must commit themselves to work on the website at least 4 hours a week (to prevent that someone messed up something, and won’t repair it for instance). It is also proposed to start with all participants at once, new participants can join the next starting group, to prevent slowing down.

Product backlog
Questions:
 * Who wants to participate? – we can ask this question at Facebook group
 * Input from Ghanaian and Ugandan partners online or through skype and when expected?
 * Offline or also involve online participants?
 * Who will take the lead in the project?
 * Timeline



(possible) Assignments
1) We learn together about making websites (programming, design, content management).

2) With what we learn, we can later on go for small collective assignments (small fee, no hard deadline).

3) Those who become ICT experts can earn an income through offering ICT skills to companies, NGOs and other organisations (collectively under RuralWeb-umbrella or on their own).

+ ICT coaches in programming, design, content management, marketing, and organisation (to accelerate learning and bring in new ICT knowledge) will be asked to support with their time and expertise (around 4h/week) to answer specific questions or give feed-back on an learning circle product.

Here you can find some websites we could improve:


 * find more organisations: find more organisations which websites can be improved. E.g. Dutch NGOs, or local companies, NGOs and governemental bodies. (Should we focus on companies in the development cooperation business?)
 * first contact:
 * we can offer an analysis of the current website
 * possible questions before the analysis:
 * what software is used for the current website? is this software easy to use? is other software a possibility? which software?
 * what should the new website look like? can we interview some people in the organisation about the wishes of the new website
 * how much budget is available to improve the website?