www.westkauaivisitorcenter.org

This week I've spent a very enjoyable two days at the West Kauai Visitor Center in Waimea. The Center provides many educational and cultural activities as well as practical resources to visitors and locals alike. My contribution over the past 24 hours has been to put up a very simple web site for them: they have wanted a web site for some time, but faced with thousands of dollars to do anything never even begun.

For $9.95 I registered the domain westkauaivisitorcenter.org for one year for them and set up Google's enterprise services (free to non-profits), including a little web site built with Google Sites. It's very simple but they are set up now and I've trained the staff to edit and add new web pages to keep it running. It's terrific that Google offers such a nice package for free to small non-profits and educational institutions, but with domain name registration the setup is non-trivial. Perhaps a bigger obstacle is that people simply do not know that all these services are available for free much less how to use them. By putting up a skeleton site quickly I was able to show them live what a site might look like, much less, Gmail, a Google calendar, and so forth.

Aletha runs the Center and is a real gem, full of enthusiasm and sharp as a tack at an unbelievable 82 years of age. It was a treat to work with her and hear stories of the Center, the town's, as well as her own personal family history. Carrie will be the new web site administrator, quickly picking up the site maintenance. Last night I copy-pasted a bunch of raw content Aletha had on hand, and today we reviewed and revised everything together to train Carrie.

It's been a nice day hanging out at the Center, helping the visitors who stop by, and plugging away at the web site, especially getting them self-sufficient at it. While I can manage fine without much trouble it's striking that relatively simple things are actually quite tricky to get right. For example, we were adding photos to the web pages -- simple, right? Actually, it was quite tricky and on their own they would have been stopped at several stages -- and I certainly would not blame them. To add one photo today we had to ...

• Browse photos on Aletha's PC to find something from past events.
• Copy the photo to Carrie's PC - without a local network, this required several steps.
• Find a flash drive with room on it.
• After mounting the flash drive, they couldn't find it (confusingly, the PC had numerous removable drives; I noted that it mounted as K: but if you missed that it was hard).
• They didn't know how to copy to the flash drive (I used the Send To / K: right click).
• You have to know to Safely Remove the flask drive before unplugging it.
• Over on the other PC, same problem finding the flash drive once mounted.
• As is the photos were way too big for the web site layout and need modification.
• We used Photoshop Elements to resize the image size (I didn't even try to explain "canvas size") and re-render down resolution for the web. Very non-intuitive step here.
• Saving the lower resolution image copy, next you have to edit the web site page itself.
• Insert / Image... and select the photo(s) to add to the web site.
• Finally, tweak the photo layout and alignment to look decent in the page flow.
• Hit Save (I thought you would get a warning if forgotten, but no, got a confusing "lost draft" dialog when I neglected doing this).
• In one place we set centered layout but don't get centering on the page (a bug?).

This is a lot of work for one photo to go up on a web site, really elementary stuff.