Forest Fire Lookout Association Inc

Webmaster Report
2008

Accomplishments since last update

Tower Page Expansion continues

We spent more time tracking down and compiling further State Tower/Lookout lists and/or links. Additional States/locations added in 2008 -

    • North Carolina
    • Virginia
    • Australia

Response continues to be favorable to this “work in progress”.  For those states that have well build web sites, we are simply linking to those lists for now and focusing on states that have no information posted.   We have Michigan in the works for early 2009. 

It is worth mentioning that it is a monumental task to keep all of these separate lookout lists updated.  The website format uses static pages to document these, so it is a very manual process to update them.  A central database driven solution would be ideal, but this is beyond the resource capability of the current webmaster.  If anyone has ideas or time to volunteer help, it would be greatly appreciated.

Other Site Details

    • Continued updates of the standard departments
    • Moved the hosting of the CO/UT site to the FFLA site
    • Many other small tweaks and enhancements
    • Web Site hits steady, up about 2% from last year
    • We expanded the use of the Lookout Jobs page, which has worked out well.

 Challenges

    • The webmaster spent less time updating the site this year due to other priorities.  Due to this, there were many delays in getting updates to the site. 
    • This year folks showed less than stellar interest in sending updates to the Web Site.  There is an incredible amount of chapter activities going on and we are only capturing a small amount of it on the web site.  The web site is a powerful tool for FFLA awareness that we are missing out on.

Web Site Future Plans

    • Continue to work on populating the Tower Page
    • Work on getting the site a face-lift.  This initiative is years overdue. 


Respectfully Submitted,
Bill Cobb
FFLA Webmaster


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