Barnstaple Grammar School and Park School

Ex-Pupils Contact Site

Last update Sun 19th March 2000

Handy hints for anyone wanting to be a 'Year Organiser'

Please note, I am not a professional web-site designer, and if you already know more than I do, please feel free to carry on with whatever you know, and ignore me.

This thing started out as a simple idea, and is now growing. So, for those who are still dipping their toes in this internet lark, the following might just help you to organise the collecting of information, and helping people in your year make contact.

You need to tell us what year you are going to run.

Do this by e-mailing us. Please include your actual e-mail address in the text of the e-mail, together with your Name (Maiden Name as well please ladies), Month and Year you were born, which September you started in the First Form, and which June you took O levels. Hopefully, that will all tie in, and you can be allotted a year to look after.

You need an E-Mail address where people can contact you.

If you don't have access to a computer, you can still have an e-mail address. Something like Hotmail will allow you to access your E-Mail from any computer belonging to a friend, college, library etc. Your address will then go on our site, so people can contact you.

If you can't get near an e-mail address, it will make life more difficult, but not impossible.

I seem to remember people used to use paper and pens, and stamps! You can phone one of us, let us have your postal address, and we'll give that out.

Now you've got E-mails arriving.

You need to decide whether you'll just collate the contacts on your own database, or whether you'll publish it as a web page, like we have. The point is, people would like to know who else is in contact.

You can set up mailing lists

Your e-mail account will have the facility to send an e-mail to someone, then a copy to any amount of other people as well. This way you can get a newsletter going, to keep everyone up to date

You could set up a bulletin board or a guest book

If you open up either on our Home Page, there are links to the company that supplies ours. You can then obtain your own bulletin board or guest book, completely free of charge, which will have it's own internet address, for people to go and visit, and read others' comments

You could set up your own Web Site.

This does not have to be a multi-million pound, multimedia extravaganza, with Flash Animations and Whizz Bang Graphics!!! The page you are reading now is written in Microsoft Word. As simple as that. You can put together the simplest possible, and maintain your contact lists in simple tables. It's easy peasy. When you get good at it, you can expand it, or use something more complicated. But no hurry. If you just had one long page, with everything typed on it, it would work.

You want to put your web page on the World Wide Web

So you've got your one long page typed up. You now want the world at large to see it. If you are with an ISP (Internet Service Provider) they will doubtless have given you some free web-space to play with. They are the ones who give you your web site address. The web space allocated will be far more than you need. They will also probably have given you some clues as to how to send your web page up onto the net. If they have, try that route first, it ought to work. If not, ask a friend. If you can't find a friend to help you, let us know.

Once you've got a web page on the net

You need people to find you. Tell us your address. Our Web Site is listed on a number of search engines, so let us know, and we'll put a link in our site, to your web-site address. This will then allow people interested in your year to hop straight from our site to yours. And Bob's your Aunt Fanny!!!

And so endeth the lesson

If you would like to add anything to this simplistic tour of Internet usage, please feel free to comment, but this is intended to be simple clues, not a definitive tour of Java Script, CGI and Dreamweaver 3. Your comments to Barrie Cann

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