This is a collaborative blog post. Pat's additions are shown in brackets, and the text is italicized.
I have a good friend in the adjacent county that is an excellent, experienced Joomla website developer, Pat Vanden Bosche. She recently completed a redesign of the Lobelville, TN, website. Lobelville is pretty progressive for a small community that is little more than a village in rural, often depressed, Perry County. Our local mayor noted Lobelville's strategic move and asked Pat for a quote. They agreed quickly.
Pat called me and asked if I would help because I already know most of the people and live much closer to Centerville, the county seat of Hickman County. She's been more active in the surrounding counties than I, so I agreed to help, thinking I might pick up some good pointers. She said she would own the design. Fair enough for me.
[I would never have agreed to do the website without your assistance, Paul. I thought it would help prevent ill feelings, but what I gained by hiring you was invaluable. I should say what the website design gained.] Since it's my hometown, it's tough to be seen as an expert. I was glad to have Pat take the lead.
We started by taking photos of the mayor and city aldermen at their monthly meeting. The same evening, we grabbed some department heads for their photos. But it wasn't just the photos we were after. Part of website building is the development of professional relationships. Friendships go a long way in a small town.
Pat has extensive training in computer graphics and photo processing. While I haven't laid out the cash for an Adobe subscription, she's a true believer. While she uses Photoshop, I'm running Linux-based computers, mostly, and I'm stuck with Gimp. I chose to leave most of the photo processing up to her, at least at first. Pat's design choice was to strip away the backgrounds of the portraits and use a neutral background for consistency; this was the first point I learned.
The second point I learned about Pat's work was the insistence on interviewing the key leaders and department heads in City Hall. It wasn't enough to get some statements from the mayor and hold a generalized meeting to get comments and suggestions. It wasn't enough to grab some economic data from the state or census to define the city. We split up that task, with me taking the lead for interviews with people mostly outside the City Hall building.
[At one point, the website design for Perry County before I was hired to "make it better", was a boiler plate that I found existed in several communities in Middle Tennessee. It was so sad to see the exact wording for a larger community, practically the same for our smaller county. I had been told by various people who worked for the county that it took forever to get changes, and then they were wrong. That was when I determined the value of doing interviews. I taped the interviews and began to see so much more going on than on the old site.]
I had a blast interviewing supervisors for the public works, gas, and water departments, the sewage treatment plant, the water treatment plant, the municipal airport, and animal control. While I could have gotten enough information in 15-minute interviews, mine took at least an hour each. I had already learned in a previous career that letting people talk is a far better way to gather information and goodwill. I figured I would have significant responsibility during the maintenance period of the website, so creating an aura of trust and professional respect would go a long way. I asked each supervisor to "Tell me all I need to know about ... ."
At the airport, the manager wanted to keep the slogan "America's Friendliest Airport." It's not important whether that's true. The manager must strive to live up to that slogan. Definitely friendly. Everything was clean--spotless. Pride goes a long way to helping maintain a friendly atmosphere. [We're hoping they bring back the fly-ins they used to do years ago. It drew people in from all over to visit Centerville.]
I figured I'd have to hold my nose at the wastewater plant, but I was wrong. I saw quickly that the city workers were highly skilled at their jobs, and they were proud of their service work. I saw how water from the local river was cleaned up. I saw how the wastewater was purified to the point that it was cleaner than the water entering the town's water supply system. I saw the laboratories full of more advanced equipment than I had dreamed of in graduate school. The third point I learned: These people deserve respect for what they do, and our web pages for each need to reflect that respect.
Have you noticed that I haven't mentioned any points about website development skills or tasks?
I polished up some of my photo skills with Gimp and several other tools in my tool chest. I processed my photos of the people and their jobs. Sometimes, I had to use HDR processing to balance out the exposures made on bright days with lots of contrast. While those are technical skills, they're not nearly as important as the people skills.
During these first weeks, Pat struggled with the new Joomla website template. It didn't work well, so she gave up and chose another template from her go-to template provider. She has a honed relationship with one of the developers, so she got some custom programming. Her template used the T4 framework. I hadn't used the T4 framework, but it's still derived from Bootstrap. It wasn't challenging to understand. (I wouldn't say I like it nearly as much as my preferred Helix framework.) [It really is what you are used to.] Pat made a clean, uncomplicated layout. It's going to work well. She used some extensions I hadn't used. I used some HTML and CSS coding she hadn't used. The fourth point I learned: Good technical skills and networking with other professionals make all the difference, too. The town's previous website was a disaster created from a DIY tool a well-intended, novice developer used. We have created a website that will hold up well and be easy to use and maintain. People are going to like it: https://centervilletn.org.
We will be the featured program guests at the next Joomla Users Group meeting, a monthly meeting of some of the top Joomla developers from multiple continents. [We'll add a full-page image for the show-and-tell portion of the talk.]
[We went the extra mile to get permission from other websites representing Centerville's interests, like the Chamber and Visit Centerville and so on, to use their photos and graphics and then gave them a representation of logos on the front page with links to their websites, good SEO for them and Centerville, good PR. Never publish anything without proper permissions. The story behind the artwork of Minnie Pearl on the front page was that the artist was contacted and asked if we could use it and what he wanted to let us use it: royalties. He gave me a very modest number and said he would be proud to see the site when it's completed. I will follow up with him after the dust has settled. Then, there was the Grinder's Switch Hour; I emailed the website and asked for permission to use photos of the players. I told Paul, and he said he knew them all and would take care of it. What a difference that made! He even videoed the show to give a brief taste of their good performance and a photo of the audience. This is an excellent example of Paul's value in this process.]
[This was the first time in 20 years I was willing to bring in additional help, and it turned out to be a good move. Paul was the face for most of the interviews, and my subcontractors in Asia were what the site needed when I got stuck or wanted the site to do something that wasn't in the original design.]
