I joined the Monterey Peninsula Yacht Club back in 2006 and had been sailing in Monterey, pretty much since I moved here in 1994. I recall sitting on the MPYC deck after a race telling someone, “I hang out here enough, I should join the club…” just as those words came out of my mouth someone asked, “Do you want to manage the web site?” because they knew I was a geek, in a good way.
So after joining and doing a quick needs analysis of what they wanted to do with the site, I did some research and selected Joomla (WordPress wasn’t very popular at the time) which had what we needed:
- A web front end with a variety of pages and content
- ability for many users to contribute (CMS)
- a directory
- and a calendar
I did a bit of research and, at the time, Joomla was a very full featured CMS with many plugins so I set up an instance on my local computer, got it working as desired and eventually transferred it to the MPYC.org host.
Since setting it up I have been managing it on an ongoing basis; populating the calendar, making changes, updating content, etc. It turns out most people are not comfortable adding content to the web site so they email me and I do it. It has been an interesting process over the years, tweaking the site to make it look better, managing and applying the updates, introducing new features as people have requests.
Additionally I am the club geek:
- Helping the manager with his tech questions
- Upgrading the club’s computers
- Helping make decisions on what technology to buy/use for the Point of Sale system
- Upgrading the club’s Internet connection
A good group of people who I am happy to help out. Different people have different expertise and this is mine.