News pages at Reform sites

December 6, 2000

Instead of manually fixing up these pages, I'm moving from HTML source files to XML source files. I might move all the content into a database, output XML, then transform it with XSLT to produce the HTML pages.

I have found a great method for critiquing the page designs across all the Reform sites, to gather the recommendation data to put into my database. Then you'll see nice multiple views of the data -- a page for all data about Smith.org, and a page for all data about the donation pages at each site (descriptions, evaluation, recommendations). I anticipate site managers addressing my critiques, thus making my pages out of date soon, as far as the bugs I report for each page of each site. It's interesting that when I critique site pages, the pages change in response -- this is more dynamic than book reviews or movies, because the book or movie doesn't quickly change to reflect your suggestion.

I wish to be Santa Claus this season to bring in lots of gifts to the Reform orgs. Even if I don't draw lots of beneficent donors to and through this site, I will have helped improve the sites of the Reform orgs.

Every Reform site manager I've heard from, in various online venues, has taken action to address my critiques and consider my recommendations. That shows that there is a need for this specialized volunteer effort of improved online navigation and donation design for Reform sites.

-- Michael Hoffman

[todo: link to hitdonate.net page on this topic]

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