Dominique Clément in History through Claire Carlin enquired regarding helping him put on a workshop for faculty on creating a simple web page. Discussed with Greg, Martin, Elizabeth and responded to Dominique as below. Dominique replied to say he'd check into Kompozer and get back to me next week:

On question #1 (who's the hcmc contact?): Stewart.

On question #2 (what's the date?): Wednesday November 21 from 2:30-4:00

On question #3 (nature of hcmc participation): If your audience is largely or exclusively Humanities, then HCMC is the sensible source for technical expertise. We know about the university's standards for web pages and what the central computing people recommend now and plan for the future. We've also got experience designing websites for a range of purposes and to be maintained by a range of people, so can provide useful input on what kinds of features are relatively simple to do and which kinds are more demanding. We can also talk about what are better and worse ways of implementing commonly used features.

On question #4 (location) We do have labs which could be used if available. The Clearihue computer labs also have rooms which can be booked - we've approached the people running those labs and they're ok with the idea. The room we finally settle on may depend on the software we elect to use. (see below) We have a projector, as do most of the rooms we'd be booking, so that shouldn't be an issue.

On question #5 (software) Right now the university supports Dreamweaver and its derivative product Contribute, but users have to buy the software. Sometime in the next few years that position may change as they introduce a web-based Content Management System intended to allow creation of web pages. Dreamweaver is on some computers in the computer labs, but it's a pretty industrial-strength program for casual or neophyte users. Do you care about hardware platform (Windows vs Mac)?

The computer labs also provide a program called nvu, which is a much simpler authoring program than Dreamweaver and will likely do what the beginning user wants. The most recent releases of nvu are called Kompozer, and we may be able to get the people running the labs to update their copies of nvu to Kompozer. The other advantage of Kompozer is that it is free and a version exists for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. You might want to download it, try it out and see if you think it is appropriate for the intended audience. http://www.kompozer.net/

Last couple of notes:
In addition to encouraging people to create simple pages for themselves, the HCMC also wants them to be aware of:
- planning and good practices
- what kind and level of support HCMC can (and can't) provide
- issues commonly encountered by beginners or occasional authors, and how to deal with them
- client-server issues: uploading and file permissions