The document discusses the website concept www.participate.ge and lists tools that could be used for the site such as Wordpress, Delicious, Librarything, Google Translate, Twitter, Twitterfeed, and RSS. It also mentions potential site features like slideshows, photo galleries, polls, and web statistics.
http://testiss1.wordpress.com
WordPress.com is a weblog hosting provider, like our example site.
WordPress(.org) is an open source Content Management System, which requires you to install your own version on your server, with more freedom.
See also: http://en.support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org
1: Explanation on how to create a website with Wordpress
2: Using Delicious and Librarything for a Resource Center
3: Google Translate to Georgian and other languages
4: Chatting service
5: Twitter
6: Automatic RSS feeds with news from other websites
7: By hand selected links from other websites
Wordpress Dashboard (Posts).
Here you manage your pages, news posts, media and files, comments, theme’s, widgets, menu structure, settings etc.
On this screenshot you see 3 Posts, which are displayed on the home page as news items.
Wordpress Dashboard (Pages)
Pages are the static web pages, unlike Posts they are permanently visible. For example the About Us page.
You can create as many pages as you want and can place them in a structured menu.
In these pages you can add text, links, images, documents etc, which brings us to the next slide.
Wordpress Dashboard (Media).
In this screen you can manage your media, consisting of photo’s, PDF and Word documents etc.
These are files you upload yourself from your PC to Wordpress.
You have a free upload space of 3 GB when using the Wordpress.com blog.
When you choose to install Wordpress.org to your own server, you have your own storage space.
Wordpress Dashboard (Appearance)
- In the Appearance section you can select your theme. This is something you can even change when your website is running, without losing any content.
- Also the Menu is created here, which in our website is seen at the top menu bar.
- Finally the Widgets are also managed here. Widgets are small applications that take data from another source and show it on your website.
In this web version of Wordpress widgets are limited to the sidebars, in the served installed version you can also embed this function inside the normal pages.
So, after going to these steps, just using the CMS from Wordpress, you would get a website like this.
Not bad, but not very interactive.
With the use of Widgets and some other tools we would get this: (next slide)
1: We have presented how to set up a Wordpress website.
2: Now we are going to show you a (free) way to create a Resource Center using Delicious and Librarything.
For our Resource Center, we have used a division between books and digital resources.
Also, we have used 2 tools: Delicious and Librarything.
Delicious is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks.
LibraryThing is a social cataloging web application for storing and sharing personal library catalogs and book lists.
Using these two free tools we have set up a Resource Center with easy to find online documents and physical books.
Starting with the e-resources.
Simply bookmark the link to the website or PDF in Delicious. Assign some tags (and notes if needed) to the bookmark and it is filed in your account.
Everyone with the password can add bookmarks, visitors can see and browse through your bookmarks using the tags you assigned.
With these tags you can create an extensive library of electronic resources, each with multiple tags explaining the subject and nature of the resource.
For books we have to do one step extra.
In Librarything there’s a database of millions of books.
When the Resource Center has a book, look up the book in Librarything.
Add it to you Librarything account (this is optional, see screenshot).
Bookmark the Librarything link with Delicious (as you would do with an online document).
When you tag this as Book, it will be under Books in Delicious and your Resource Center.
You can even assign books you lend out a temporary Book_on_loan tag so people can see the book is on loan.
Here you see the Resource Center again.
At the right hand Tags menu, you can click on all ‘Books’ or ‘Books on loan’, but also all resources on ‘Recipes’, ‘Restaurants’ etc.
3: Google Translate
Google Translate has a Georgian Translate option since a few months. It is still in Alpha phase, meaning it is not finished but improving.
The button we created automatically translates to Georgian but can be set to any language by the visitor.
4: Chat with us
Using Meebo, you can add a free Instant Messaging service to your website.
Someone should be logged in to Meebo.com where he will be notified of guests asking questions via the website’s: Chat with us
The right hand side bar we have reserved for Other News (5,6,7).
These 3 widgets are showing news we did not place in the front page news posts, but they will be visible on every page of our website in the right hand menu.
5: Twitter
Via Twitter you can post messages which your followers can read. Twitter is used by people a lot, but more and more organizations are also starting to use Twitter.
It is a good way to get news out quickly to people who are interested in your cause (because they already chose to follow you).
Using an extra tool called Twitterfeed, all News Posts are now automatically also send to Twitter.
So news posts don’t have to be manually added to Twitter, this happens automatically.
Of course we can also still post a message on Twitter ourselves.
6: RSS Feed (Cooking News)
RSS is a web feed format used to publish frequently updated works like news headlines.
It can be used to publish headlines of another websites on your own website, as we did here with news from the Cooking News website.
Using it like this however, no selection can be made, all headlines will be shown automatically.
It can also be used to show latest bookmarks instead of headlines.
7: External News/Links
In our Resource Center we have a tag called News.
Any website or PDF we think should be in the External News section, we assigned the tag News.
It will than appear here.
This is another form of RSS, but now the selection is done by you.
Other possibilities (all visible under the About Us pages):
Slideshows / photo galleries
Polls
Web statistics
Slideshare (this presentation can be downloaded from Slideshare):
http://www.slideshare.net/PetervHelden/website-concept
(including speaker notes)
