The way my life has been going lately I’d probably be better off not gloating but sometimes ya just have to live on the edge.<\/p>\n
At the beginning of July I got an IM from a friend who was also a web vendor for The Non-Profit while I was Web Manager. Mark told me that my replacement had faxed them 30 days’ notice that The Non-Profit intended to withdraw from their hosting and support contract with his company. Now, Mark and I had done a similar thing to The Non-Profit’s previous web hosting vendor, to the tune of a 98% per month savings for The Non-Profit, but we’d done all our work up front: getting scripts reading, beta testing them, coding HTML pages, testing those, resizing images, and like tasks so that by the time we gave notice we’d be ready to immediately switch on the hosting and DNS<\/a> for the site’s URL to the new server. <\/p>\n My replacement had been, rather obviously, moving content off the servers at Mark’s company but did not immediately switch the DNS. In fact, it took him 25 days, approximately, to make that critical switch. How do I know this? Honestly, I’ve been looking because I was curious to see what he was going to do. Was he going to transfer hosting to another web-based content management system written by his coding buddies? Was he going to work with The Non-Profit’s International Office to use their content management system? It was, for me, a bit like watching a chess match and waiting to see what the next move would be. He finally made his next move. <\/p>\n Not only did he switch servers, something fairly easy to look up using Network Solutions WHOIS<\/a> lookup, but he also changed the look and feel of the site. Why am I gloating? Because his changes aren’t for the better.<\/p>\n One of the issues any charitable organization faces is a paucity of funds. This is why you’re forever getting solicitations from one charity when you’ve given money to a completely different charity: they trade lists and, with most of them anyway, if you don’t specifically tell them not to they will trade your name and address to other “like minded groups.” Which means if you give money to, say, the World Wildlife Fund (disclaimer: I did not work at the WWF; they are not The Non-Profit to which I am constantly referring), it’s very likely that you’ll be getting a solicitation from Amnesty International or OxFam or the ACLU in the four to six months following your donation.<\/p>\n When I was at The Non-Profit I was constantly working with the membership and fund raising folks to best position the join\/donate\/give button on each page, to make the donation form easy to use and pretty, to provide the information the IRS requires each non-profit organization in the U.S. to have publicly available so we were in compliance with the law. In my replacement’s new design this link to join\/donate\/give is buried in a secondary menu. Yeah, it’s right there on the front page when you get to the site, and it’s available from all five of the pages in that section, but from no where else. For an organization that has been struggling financially for the past three years I’d say that probably wasn’t the best move.<\/p>\n As well, because I am curious and because I’m a geek I took at the code behind the site as well as the cascading style sheet. Save to say, I am not impressed.<\/p>\n The CSS is not disability friendly (font sizes in px for god’s sake!) and the code is, well, a bit of a mess. Tags are used incorrectly, they’ve combined CSS with tags that aren’t in the current standard, oh, and biggest sin of all: there’s no doctype definition.<\/p>\n Why does all this matter? It really shouldn’t but it’s a bit frustrating to see something that I poured two years of blood, sweat, and, quite literally, tears into torn down after only a year, and torn down for something that isn’t any better for the site visitor. Perhaps he’s saving the organization money. It’s quite possible he is but when I made the decision to stay with the outside hosting firm instead of work with the International Office it was a choice between spending about $45,000 for 2003 or spending $110,000 for 2003 for web site hosting as the International Office was demanding we contribute 90,000 Euro to their budget (at the time the conversion rate was around $1 USD for 1 Euro).<\/p>\n Were all my decisions perfect? No, not at all, but they were the best decisions to that could have been made given the circumstances and constraints. And I’m gloating because, by all accounts from friends I left behind at The Non-Profit, from my friends at the web vendor, and from the web editor I supervised, my replacement is, well, an asshole. I don’t think he has any idea what he’s gotten himself into and I can already smell the roasting goose. I’m just hoping that some of the magnificent Senior Management Team<\/a> gets a little cooked on this one as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The way my life has been going lately I’d probably be better off not gloating but sometimes ya just have to live on the edge. At the beginning of July I got an IM from a friend who was also a web vendor for The Non-Profit while I was Web Manager. 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