New NARGS website

From Grazyna Grauer, website volunteer and NARGS president

The new NARGS website is up!! It went up Sunday night, May 3. Hugh MacMillan, our designer in Colorado, spent a long weekend transferring data from the prototype to the actual website. The NARGS address is: http://www.nargs.org

About Hugh: his expertise, dedication and unwavering support for NARGS are ASTOUNDING. The final website (it's still a work in progress) will be light years away from what Hugh's initial website plan stipulated. Yes, I did get to hear about project creep, but the resulting website will be so much more fun! Thank you Hugh! (There will be many more "thank you's" to come!!)

And now things you might like to know about the site:

1. What you see now will look different when our Volunteer Graphics Guru gets done with the website. This might take a while, as he is very busy right now.

2. Yes, the Seed Exchange segment is going to join the rest of the website, it's not on it yet. Chris Klapwijk, the creator of much of that segment will work on it.

3. There is some info on the new website, transferred form the old website, that is obsolete and this will be cleaned up.

4. When the new website went up, it appeared on a different Internet Service Provider (ISP) than the old one. The old one was called Hubris and we were paying Hubris about $500/year for hosting. The new one is siteground.com and costs us $71/year.

Having said that, when we have the on-line shopping cart for the Book Service (under development), we will need secure web pages for credit card transactions. This means we'll need an SSL (Secure Socket Layers) account and that will cost us an additional $70 or so a year. Plus, if we decide to add PayPal, another $30/month.

5. Speaking about the Book Service, while the on-line ordering is being developed, books can be ordered by printing the website order form and mailing it to Mohnton, Pennsylvania.

6. Photo Gallery is currently accessible to the general public for viewing purposes, but only NARGS members will be able to post pictures. Actual posting will be done through the Photo Gallery Administrator and his team.

Login to the Photo Gallery will be synchronized from the nargs.org site and not directly into the gallery.

How will you log in? If you supplied your email address when paying membership dues, we'll e-mail you your login information once it is created (please be patient, there are over 1000 users to set up). If not, the query will go to Bobby Ward (our Executive Secretary), he'll check if you are a member, add your e-mail address to the database, notify the webmaster to create a web user account, and you'll receive your login notification when it is ready.

If you are not a NARGS member, you'll be invited to join.

7. Online membership - Bobby Ward, Randy Tatroe (the Treasurer) and Hugh are in the process of getting this set up. This should take a week or so to
complete. Members have access to a printable form for now.

8. The wiki and the Discussion Forum are features that are currently accessible by signed in members. We are still evaluating the option of making these parts open to general public.

Have fun getting acquainted with our new site!