Welcome to my blog/podcast!!

Welcome to my blog/podcast. This page will soon become a resource for Greenville County school webmasters as there will be onscreen video tutorials available to cover a range of topics from my basic philosophy and vision for the school webpages to tutorials on basic to advanced techniques that you can use to optimize and enhance your website.
Let me first say that my job is to support you and help you. Please don't hesitate to call me if I can ever be of assistance. Having been a school webmaster myself for five years I fully understand your frustrations. In many ways you have a thankless job. Most people have no clue as to the amount of time and effort you put in bringing content to your site, but they are quick to criticize and point out our errors. I understand that many of you spend hours developing your site and adding content. I appreciate all that you do to bring our sites to a level that you, your school, and the district can be proud of.
There are two major points that I want to stress to begin with. These are two areas that I would like for you to seriously keep in mind as you continue to build your sites. These represent commonly accepted "best practices" in web design and development and my major focus on the school and district websites. First, content is king. Before you think about fancy clip-art, animations, widgets, or other special web functions, you should make sure that every page is RICH in content. Many webmasters become guilty of being so self-focused that they spend so much time on all the things that they can do on a web page rather than the content. A web visitor's main objective is to find content at your site and will not be impressed with any "cool effects" if they cannot locate the content they came searching for. In addition the content on your front page should be interesting and non-static - that is, changing with additional "fresh" information. Your front page is your "welcome mat" to your site. If you have the same thing on your front page all the time, some visitors will lose interest. But if you change your content by including announements, news items, pictures, or calendar items, visitors will return to your site to stay informed with the "happenings" at your school.
Secondly and for the sake your survival, we all need to strive to separate content from design. Your navigational menu, top and bottom site information, and basic page formatting (CSS) need to be in separate external files and not on all pages. This will definitely make your job easier down the road. Most of you already do this, but some of you have not yet come on board. Please call me if I can help you move in this direction.
One last comment... Those of you new webmasters -- please do not come in and un-do what was mentioned above in my second point. New webmasters (and you know that I am one as well) often come in with fresh ideas and make radical changes. As long as you maintain a separation of content and design while you make these changes, I can live with that. But if you make radical changes and un-do work that others have done to separate content from design, that will just cause a lot of extra work and headaches for me and whoever takes your place when you move on to bigger and better things.
Well, these are just some things to think about. I will be posting regularly (I hope) and will begin to produce onscreen tutorials by August (hopefully).
Stay tuned.