Motion to approve $850 for the purchase of software: vBulletin, vBulletin Template, aMember upgrade, Screenflow, Gallery and software installation. Â vBulletin $275, vBulletin template $65, vBulletin aMember plugin $40, aMember Upgrade $100, Screenflow $100, Gallery $85, Installations $150.
Dear Members and BOD The Razorback Reef website has been recognized again for its outstanding efforts put into its website. The good news is that we won the award from MASNA for website of the year 2011 for the second consecutive time, the more sobering news from the award lies in how the award was conducted this year. Voting for the award was done on a category points system for graphics, content, up-to-date, etc. being scored. This information is very valuable to the clubs as it shows in what areas clubs might want to work on. Razorback Reef received high marks for its look and being current but received its lowest scores in content. The websites overall scores was enough to win the award but clearly showed that unless we address the content of our website we will not continue to dominate the top spot of the website of the year for MASNA. I would like to explain some of the history of our website and how it got to its current position as an award winner. Our website started as an iFrame based static website with our forums built on the phpbb plat form. At the time, I frames were on their way out as browsers were not very compatible with them and phpbb forums were a great open source and well supported community. Three years ago a comprehensive plan was developed to institute a member management program with our forum so that we could keep track of members, club memberships and auto notifications. The program that was adopted was called aMember and provided a fantastic foundation for everything that our website has become. A portal home page was adopted that would integrate with the forum and display the same look as the forum. With these programs in place and functioning with maintenance by the BOD and various webmasters we have been able to win the two consecutive website of the year awards from MASNA. We currently stand at an important crossroads in thinking for how our website will progress over the next several years. There are those that feel that what got us to this point is adequate to continue and the monies requested is too much, while others feel that in order to improve our site we need to continue to invest in the site. I am in the later camp. Currently, the phpbb forum, which is dependent on volunteers to develop, is losing support and has not seen any major upgrades in some time. It is also becoming more and more difficult to incorporate new content into the phpbb code that our website is built on which makes it that much more difficult to improve on the content of our forum that the MASNA voting identified as a weakness. The proposed plan that is being put before the membership and board will convert our forums to platform that is not open sourced and therefore will continue to be supported by the company that designed it, vBulletin. vBulletin is currently the number one supported forum community, Reef Central is an excellent and popular example of a vBulletin community. An upgrade of our aMember software is needed along with ansellary support software for vBulletin that will also include Screenflow that will address members requests for video FAQ’s for our website. The BOD has also requested that our club move from a physical hosting server currently in Arkadelphia to a cloud based server, this move would be free. The current numbers are as follows: vBulletin - $275 vBulletin Template - $65 Photo Gallery - $85 aMember Upgrade - $100 aMember vBulletin Plugin - $40 ScreenFlow - $100 Cloud based webhosting – Host Gator (Free for 501c3) aMember install by CGI Central - ? vBulletin install by Calvin - $15 Currently the total for the improvement plan is $815 which would allow Razorback Reef to move forward on a supported forum platform that works with our current member management software (aMember), provide us with a cloud server with more reliable backup and support capabilities and the software to create tutorials (FAQ’s) for our website visitors. More importantly we would now be able to move into content for our website that will provide the educating about our hobby that is sorely needed. I encourage you to visit the forum poll and vote on this initiative to approve funds to accomplish these goals
