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Baltimore Yearly Meeting web site?
Yes! The photo shows a yarn web joyfully created by children in the evening program at the 1998 Annual Sessions. Once past this attempt at website coordinator humor, the remainder of the page tells how the "real" BYM web site was created and how monthly meetings, committees, Friends schools, and so on, can create their own web pages. |
This web site is maintained by members of the Web Publishing Working Group.
Much of the material in this web site is adapted from Yearly Meeting print materials by various authors. The Clerk of the Web Publishing Working Group, Howard Fullerton, and the BYM Web Site Coordinator, Allen Briggs.
The discussions at Yearly Meeting Sessions gave clear directions to the Web Publishing Working Group:
In the design of the web site we have used some "advanced" features of html when these features can safely be ignored by more primitive browsers. But features such as frames, that result in garbled pages on older browsers, have been avoided.
Comments on and corrections to the web site are encouraged. Send them to Website Coordinator. (This sends your comments Allen Briggs, BYM Web Site Coordinator, and (depending on your browser), also to Howard Fullerton, Clerk of the Web Publishing Working Group.
This site has been designed for accessibility by visually impaired users, and has been checked by Cast's "Bobby" program (see http://www.cast.org/bobby/) which ensures that all Priority 1 Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines have been satisfied. All pages (except the YF and YAF pages, which are maintained separately) meet these guidelines.
The Web Working Group encourages monthly meetings to have their own web pages. It may be helpful to look at home pages of other meetings. Having a meeting website (usually) will not cost your meeting anything.
There are two ways to have a web page for your meeting:
Having the Web Subcommittee create a page. After looking at other meetings' web sites, decide what you want in your web page. Send the text and any pictures you want to include to website coordinator. If you're not sure how to get started, talk to the website coordinator or the Web Subcommittee Clerk for suggestions.
We prefer to have the text in electronic form, preferably as a MS Word (for Windows), Word Perfect (for Windows), or DOS text (ASCII) file. However, we can also scan printed materials. Pictures can be sent as paper copies (drug store prints are fine) or as files (preferably ".gif" or ".jpg" files). A useful starting point could be a brochure intended for visitors, if you have one. If you do, a paper copy of the brochure may help us design your page. We're happy to answer questions, make suggestions, and guide you through the process.
Note, however, that the content of the page is yours, and nothing will be put on the BYM web site without your (your meeting's) approval.
BYM site. Two reasons to put your pages on the BYM site are (a) it's free (within limits), and (b) we can provide some help in getting your pages working. A limitation is that you can't put your pages up yourself -- you need to send them to the website coordinator to have them put up. Normally this is fairly fast (three days or less), but if the website coordinator takes a vacation or goes to the Yearly Meeting Sessions, he may not get to them for a week or possibly more.
Putting page(s) you create on the BYM site. If you have page(s) you want installed on the BYM web site, send them to Tom Ryan. There are three ways to send them:
Tom will then install your pages on the BYM web site and e-mail you when he has finished.
Currently, the policy is to put meeting pages up free if they do not exceed 200K total. This is a lot of text, but not very many photographs, graphics, or ".pdf" files.
Other site. If you put your pages on another web site, just send e-mail to website coordinator when they are working (and have whatever approval your meeting requires). Links will be placed to your pages in two places: one in the index of monthly meetings with web pages in the Directory of Monthly Meetings, and a second in the directory listing for your meeting (Yearbook information).
The content of your meeting's pages is entirely up to your meeting. They do not need to be reviewed by the Yearly Meeting. We can do a brief review of your pages if you wish and make suggestions. We suggest that you keep file sizes (especially images) small so that your pages load quickly even on a computer connected to the internet by a modem. We suggest that your pages be usable even if image loading is turned off in the browser. We also suggest that you avoid features that don't work on some browsers, such as frames and Java applets.
If you put your page on the BYM site, the URL for your page will be of the form www.bym-rsf.org/statecollegefriends or www.bym-rsf.org/scfm. If you use another site as a host, the naming will usually be similar, e.g. www.quaker.org/fmw.
It is possible -- but it costs money -- to get a "domain name" for your meeting, such as www.sandyspring.org. If you want to do this, you cannot put your pages on the BYM site. For information about getting a domain name, see www.networksolutions.com
A brief description of all the BYM committees is included on the committee page in the BYM web site. Any committee can expand the description of their work, and we will include it in the committee page. An alternative is for the committee to have a web page. We will put a link to it in the committee page. The committee's page can be hosted by the BYM web site or can be on another host. The options are similar to those for monthly meetings, above.
Friends Schools in the BYM area are invited to put web pages on the BYM web site. This is done in a manner similar to monthly meetings, above. If a school has a web page, either on the BYM site or another site, we will put a link to it in the schools page of the BYM site.
Creating a web page can be quite similar to creating a paper document. This section will refer to using Microsoft Front Page, Home Page, or AOLpress, but other programs such as Netscape Composer are similar.
Creating a page on a web page editor such as Microsoft Front Page, Front Page Express, Claris Home Page, or AOLPress, is somewhat similar to using a word processor, and isn't much harder (at least for simple things). Front Page is available as part of the Microsoft Office Suite or as a separate program. AOLPress is free, even if you aren't an AOL customer, and can be downloaded from http://www.aolpress.com/(but note that AOLPress is not being updated or supported any more.)
However, unlike a word processor, you do not fully control how the output will look to a user. How it appears on a user's screen depends on:
You should eventually test your page on both Netscape and Internet Explorer, and possibly on an older version of one of these browsers. You should also test with the browser in a small window, and with graphics turned off.
Like a word processor, you type paragraphs without using the "Enter" or "Return" key until the end of the paragraph.
You should know that paragraphs are more primitive in web pages than in a word processor document. You cannot easily indent paragraphs, and the browser leaves a blank line between paragraphs. If you want to go to a new line without inserting a blank line, this is called a "line break". On many page creation programs (such as AOLPress) you create a line break by typing a "shift-enter".
Spaces also act differently in web pages. If your html file contains multiple spaces, they will (usually) appear as a single space on the screen of your browser. There is a way to insert extra spaces (by inserting " " in your html file (without the quotes)), but this should be used sparingly. On AOLpress there is no way to insert these extra spaces except by going into the source file and typing them manually.
It may not be obvious how to exert tight control of where things appear on the screen. This is generally best done by creating tables (with invisible borders) where the individual cells can contain text, graphics, or both.
Frames are a method of creating regions on the screen that seem useful at first, but the BYM Website Coordinator recommends that you avoid them, because some Friends have old browsers that can't handle frames, because the user can be easily confused about what page they are actually looking at, and one commonly available browser trims off the right edge and bottom of pages displayed in frames.
For your web page to be effective, people need to look at it. This is done by having links to your page from various places -- generally the more the better. Begin by making sure the BYM Website Coordinator knows about your page, Later check to see that links have been put in the appropriate places in the BYM web site, and that the links work as you expect.
The most complete set of Quaker links is at www.quaker.org, which includes links to web pages for Meetings, Friends Schools, Young Friends, and so on. To get a link to your page, send e-mail to the address given in the web site, tell them that your meeting (or school or whatever) has a web page, and give the URL. (If your page is kept on the BYM site, the URL will typically be something like www.bym-rsf.org/my_meeting.)
If your community has a community web site (perhaps listing community organizations such as churches and schools), you should ask them to link to your page.
If you want additional links to your pages, you might consider listing yourself with sites such as Yahoo. You can do this directly by going to the site and looking for directions on how to suggest your pages to them. A simpler method is to use software or a service that automatically generates messages to the major search engines.
If you are writing a web site for a Friends school that is a member of the Friends Council on Education, you should make sure that the Council lists your web site in the listing for your school.
Many search programs make use of special hidden information in your web page, including a short description and/or a list of keywords. You can put this information in "META" commands in the html source of your page. The form of this is:
<META name="description", content="Short description of your organization goes here">These META commands should follow the "<HEAD>" and "<TITLE>" tags, near the beginning of the source of the page.
The title and the description and keyword META commands used in the BYM site
are:
<TITLE>Baltimore Yearly Meeting of Friends (Quakers)</TITLE>
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="BYM serves Friends
meetings (local Quaker congregations) in Maryland, Pennsylvania,
Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Quakers are religious
witnesses for peace and justice.">
<META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="Quaker, Friends,
peace, meeting, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, District of Columbia,
Peace church, Christian, religion, justice, equality, integrity,
Religious Society of Friends, Friends meeting, Quaker meeting">
The following sites may be helpful in creating meta tags: http://vancouver-webpages.com/META/mk-metas.html generates meta tags from information you give it. The site http://www.northernwebs.com/set/setsimjr.html examines your meta tags and makes suggestions. For additional resources, go to Yahoo ( http://www.yahoo.com/ ) and follow the path Computers and Internet > Data Formats > HTML > META Tag
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Last Revised 10/25/2004