Nancy's Web If you don't know where you've been, how do you know where you are?

Kappa Beta< is a support group for transgendered individuals. Their web site was old, stale, hard to maintain, and had an inconsistent look. When their webmistress resigned, some friends who are members asked me to take it over if I could. It had been created with one of those "slick web site builders" that are all over the place; it was a piece of garbage!

I cleaned it up and essentially replaced every bit of HTML in it. Using frames, I gave it a consistent look and easy navigation. But I wanted the ability for the members to maintain it themselves as well as for someone to be able to succeed me as webmistress. This was one of the reasons why I started looking at content management systems.

When their web host decided to express a personal prejudice against them, I had to move the site. In the five days it took to transfer the domain name, I had completely rebuilt, and even added to, the site with Drupal. In doing so, it opened the site up to the search engines to help them gain new members.

In making the change I was able to give administrative privileges to the Board of Directors and make it easy for them to manage the site. I then documented how a successor could take over for me, whenever they choose one.

With the release of Drupal 5.1, I took the opportunity to expand on the dynamic nature of the site, including custom modules. With Drupal 6, it was greatly improved. Upon my move, however, someone else converted the live site to Wordpress and took away many of the nice features.