Group Content

Groups are a means for all the different facets of your organisation to have their own expression - their own part of the web site.

Group Home Page articles

Before launching the site, it is important to write some articles that provide context to each of the groups. Most groups will benefit from having a short introductory article describing the project/activity, which appears when you first visit the group. This is the group home page article.

For example, on a church web site, the "Children's Work" group home page could describe the vision and work in general terms and include links to pages for different age groups. Writing the home page for a group is a task that could be delegated to group leaders throughout the organisation - it gives them an opportunity to get to grips with the document editor and encourages delegation and empowerment from the very start.

To make a homepage article, write and publish the document in the normal way. Then from the list of published documents in that group, click the Quick Options menu on the far right and select the option to 'Select as Homepage Article'. This will make that article appear when a visitor uses the menu system to navigate to that group.

Groups need articles to appear in the menu system

A group without any articles will not appear in the navigation on the web site. This reduces the number of dead ends when visitors explore, as it may be that groups are only used for administrative purposes and will never contain content. So for a particular group to feature on the site - you need to make sure that they have written an article, or two!

Group Events, Rotas and other content

Training and encouragement should be given to those responsible for the group, so that they are able to add content (such as rotas and events) into their area. Many leaders may be expecting someone else to take care of the web site, but making the leaders responsible for their own area encourages ownership and effective use.

Rotas are a good feature for leaders to see how they can use the web site to help them run their activities, they will save time and effort in compiling lists of helpers. Make group leaders aware of the web site functionality, rotas can be emailed out automatically, printable versions are available for those that don't have internet access and that email reminders will be sent from the web site (unless specified otherwise).

For detailed instructions on setting up rotas refer to the rota article here