Mico Alumni Happenings

The Mico Alumni Association of South Florida’s website provides a method of creating awareness (to the world population and in particular, Miconians across the globe) of the work and existence of the association.  We have the luxury of using this very powerful and far-reaching means of communication and interaction to reach our audience. However, we can only do so effectively if we fully understand and embrace the real objective of having a web presence.

If we stop for a moment and think about it, websites seem mystic only because of the technological method of publishing coupled with the ease and speed of accessing the message or data contained within. Quite contrary to the thinking of a large majority of our population, there is no difference (in principle) between publishing a magazine, book or periodical and a website. If you set about to publish a book, you would first think of your objective, then create an outline of chapters etc. The same holds true for the website. We need to decide on our intended purpose for having the site then decide on the outline and content that will fulfill our particular objective.

It is only after we have written our book within the framework of the outline and objective that we will even attempt to contact a publishing house. Sure, we will want to get the input of our publisher where cover design and methods of marketing and distribution are concerned but we need to have the book in hand first. The same is true of our websites.

Often, organizations and individuals will decide that they need a web site to market their product or message or just to establish a presence.  Instinctively they know that a website will help their cause but they usually omit the very important step of providing the material or data that is required to make the website functional. Imagine going to your publisher and saying “I want you to publish a book that explains how motivate people to work together”.  As would be expected, his first task would be to proof read the book, but if you did not provide this book where would it come from? Publishers have to be knowledgeable about ink, printers, paper, typesetting and channels by which you can get your book to market, but they don’t write the books or magazines or periodicals and the same is true for webmasters. In the case of web sites, the webmasters are concerned with Hypertext Markup Language (html), servers, web hosting accounts, and bandwidth and page organization.