Contribute in Use

Web site content may be either static, or dynamic. Static refers to content not generated by the web server at the moment a web page is requested. An example may be a news story that a human has typed directly onto the web page. Dynamic content on the other hand, might be the display of a specific member’s address that the web server needed to retrieve from a database before generating the web page.

Contribute is one option for allowing non-technical users to manage static content, but it will not be useful for managing dynamic content. The following is intended to demonstrate the areas of a bar web site where Contribute may be an appropriate tool for managing static content.

• Updating rosters
  Each year new committee chairs, section councils, officers, etc. are named and the web site must be udpated in response. Ideally, your membership database would know which members serve in which Bar positions and your web site could access that information to generate always-current rosters of these committees without any human intervention.
  
  However, because that requires non-trivial up-front development costs, you may find that area of your web site needs to be updated manually. This is where Contribute comes in and permits the workload to be distributed across the bar by the most relevant department freeing up your web staff to work on other, less mundane tasks.
  
• Newsletters
  Many entities within bars publish newsletters and many of those newsletters are now made available exclusively in an electronic format. Whereas in the past, they would have been laid out in desktop publishing software like QuarkXpress or PageMaker, they now may be published by non-tech staff using Contribute.
  
  Newsletters must still undergo the same editorial vetting process as always, but Contribute gives newsletter creators a Send for Review option so that they may be approved by appropriate staff before being published on a Bar’s web site. As with updating rosters, the mundane aspects of newsletter publishing may be offloaded across various bar staffers without burdening dedicated web staff.