Why would a Chapter want to create a Website? American Academy of Pediatrics' Chapters around the Country have examined this question and answered with different and unique reasons. This is why I created our California Chapter 1 website.
The Internet and the World Wide Web were flooding all forms of the media in 1995. At first I ignored it as hype, but gradually I succumbed to my curiosity and realized the wonderful potential to a powerful method to share information.
In the summer of 1995 our first web pages appeared. I decided that I would create some pages for our Chapter and test the latest technology.
Information development and distribution is a primary goal for any Chapter organization. As a person who learned desktop publishing in the mid 1980's, I saw the Web providing an effective alternative to publishing on paper media and to distribute information. Electronic publishing is also a medium that is much less expensive than paper and can help lower costs for publications and distribution.
There were two primary goals for our Website. First create an almanac of our Chapter organization that the membership could access and one the general population could use. Second, connect it to as many resources as the viewer would need.
The first goal is much easier to achieve because most Chapters already have a manual that describes their structure, their membership activities, and some of the projects that they want to herald. So I confiscated as much information as I could from already created databases and flyers, then placed them into the world of hypertext for the Web. The second goal is an almost impossible task to achieve. The numbers of new sites and resources are growing too fast for a part-time webmaster.
At the time our website appeared there were almost no other Chapter organizations available and even the National AAP Website was only being discussed. The Internet contained quite a bit of information on diseases and organizations in the form of text, but not available in the friendly graphical world of the World Wide Web.
One forerunner of the well-referenced Web source of pediatric links stood out, created by Andy Spooner, MD. His work is a godsend to us part-timers. It is meeting the needs for national information and general pediatric topics. For our Chapter, I am attempting to design links that will be unique to our District and Chapter, and keep them updated.
California hosts an entire District with four Chapters. There is a huge volume of information unique to our region on the Internet that could be linked through our site. This will be an ongoing work, but the membership and the community will benefit from a dynamic pediatric website.
A serious conundrum facing a regional organization is where to house this information and through which agent. The National AAP, it is safe to say, has deeper pockets to finance, design, upkeep, and provide the connection hardware. This issue triggered my desire to write about website development.
Our Chapter website was started by an interested, technology geek with good motives and financed on a shoestring budget. A fully functioning site can cost thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to start from scratch and maintain. We started with donated time and a personal site costing $17.50 per month based from a Fresno, California private Internet provider. The problem with that situation is that private Internet Providers are not like the Telephone Company - they can disappear because of competitive market forces. Ours did in May 1997, and forced me to do a quick rewrite and relocate.
To achieve the goals of providing the resources and information to Academy membership, I believe that we would benefit from a game plan to assist in technical support, design, and possible Internet Provider services to those Chapters where a geek like me is not available. I hope we can see some sage words of advice from SCOT (Section on Computers and Other Technologies) or the National AAP to help other Chapters who wish to create their own Chapter Website.
Our temporary website location is http://www.thesocket.com/~simonian/aap1.html with our new location planned at http://www.aapca1.org.