The VtV RMV Users Group conducted a User Talk that explored best practices for keeping your village’s web content fresh, useful, current, and accurate. Click on the diagram on the right to view the presentation
that you can review, download and print. Click here if you would like to see the pdf file with speaker's notes for the talk.
The presentation is not about what the content should be, but rather how to keep the content up-to-date and relevant after your Village decides how it wants to use the web. A video of the entire discussion can be viewed here..
A few of the key points in the presentation:
- Decisions on how to use the web must be made as a part of the Village’s overall plan for marketing & communications – what audiences, what messages, what calls to action
- The strategy for the web should be integrated with your Village’s strategy for Social Media
- The Village should have a process for reviewing and updating all webpages
- Each webpage should have an “owner” responsible for the content of that page
- The task of the “writer and editor” to create content is different from the task of the “typesetter” (webmaster) to insert that content into webpages and update the site. In most circumstances, Villages should have different people performing each of these tasks.
- The Village should consider ways to move some of web-related effort from the people who are your Village’s busiest staff and volunteers – use standards, use web tools, bring in specialists, and develop for maintainability
- No Village will use all the tips included; use those that will work best for your Village.
Because you may likely find both the slide content and the “discussion notes” of interest, we have posted PDFs of both here in the Village Template. We have also included the PowerPoint slide deck if you wish to modify it to create a customized presentation for your Village. Note, there may be some formatting issues, depending on what version of PowerPoint you are using. This should open in either Google Slides or macOS Keynote with minimal formatting problems.