Redesigning the G&S Website

I really shouldn’t be thinking about this right now (I should be studying, but I was taking care of some G&S business anyway and I thought I’d do some research), but I’m looking into doing the HRG&SP redesign using Movable Type. This would mean that the site could be updated by people who don’t know a smidgen about HTML and PHP and CSS and all that other stuff that I find absolutely fascinating.

There’s a really good post about using Movable Type for non-blog websites that shows some examples, and the fact that it was posted in July 2003 leads me to believe that there’ve got to be resources for this online. I think I’m going to become a bigger computer nerd than I already am…

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Published:: 01.15.05 / 10pm

Category:: harvard, web design, theater

2 Comments

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Blake 01.16.05 / 1am

That’s a really interesting idea. From what I saw in your link, though, it seems the author of that page didn’t see MT as a way of removing the knowledge requirement to make web posts. Instead, she sees MT as a more convenient way to post content than FTP and a text editor.

An alternative to consider is to wrap as much of the pages as possible into common include files, so that the each file has a bare minimum beyond the page-specific content. I find that reducing the amount of “extra” stuff from the HTML files helps people edit webpages.
Margaret 01.16.05 / 1am

I should probably do that anyway, whether or not I end up going with MT. That’ll make it easier for me to change things, regardless of what’s there.

As for that post, some of the sites cited were using MT more as an organizational solution, or for (like you said) ease at getting at the code. But there is definitely also the implication that using MT for a site like this makes it easier for people who can’t edit code to edit webpages. Also, I think it’s a good solution for our archive of previous shows. We have sooo much information to put in that archive, much of it which has yet to be scanned or put on the server.

I’m still exploring though. We’ll see what happens.