Development Guidelines
Consider the following questions and points when deciding to develop a website as questions such as these will generally be asked when applying for development work to be done.
Do you have good reasons to develop a stand-alone website?
- What do you hope to achieve by having a website? Which audiences do you expect to serve, and how?
- A single website should generally consist of at least 30 or more pages. Do you envisage having content substantial enough to warrant a website? Exceptions can be made for temporary or special purpose websites (e.g., research consortium, project or study).
- An alternative to setting up your own website is to have a page on a larger website, such as a school website. For this contact your school website administrator.
Can you dedicate resources to developing and maintaining a website?
- There must be resources formally dedicated to managing the website. Who is identified to be the site administrator? Does he / she have a position description indicating their area of activity?
Is there a match between your proposed website size and the resources available in your area?
- A website’s size should be commensurate with the resources that can be devoted to it. How many designated page administrators are there? A rule of thumb is that, for content alone, a single page would require one hour of maintenance per month. A loading for site administration per page would be roughly 20 minutes per month.
What is the individual or collective expertise and aptitude?
- An adequate level of expertise is expected in order to operate functionally in the CMS environment. Is there adequate expertise within the group to enable website maintenance? Is there an aptitude for working with web and content-driven environments? Some knowledge of HTML is an advantage, however, it does not qualify you to "manage" information. Identify your training needs in consultation with the Medicine Computing Support Unit.
- To ascertain what types of activities site and page administration involves see the MedWeb CMS Roles.