WEBSITES
(Posted 2007-10-12 14:00:53 by ArchPaladin)

I just realized that my links page has no section for the martial arts. 
This is not the first time I've found out about a section of websites that
I should be linking to and never bothered to put up.  Anyway...

So I've mentioned already that ILMA's website is running.  It looks OK -
currently it's not much more than the total amount of marketing material
that we have.  Everything is static; nothing is very memorable.  When my
business partner and I first started talking about a website, we had
envisioned something close to this.  Since that time I have desired to make
the site into something else.

I want the site to become a content repository for all of the martial arts
information that we present at the school.  There is a lot of historic
secrecy around the martial arts that is really starting to be dispelled
within the past ten years or so because of the growth of people publishing
books, trade magazines, and other printed reference material.  This has
been very good for the industry, but it's not going to carry the arts into
my generation, or the ones after it.  So, I want to merge all of our
information with the online world.

I envision a website that contains all of our lesson plans and other
curricula.  A site that has the documentation of the kata that we have, as
well as the meanings and history surrounding them.  A site that has
detailed descriptions, pictures, and video of all the techniques that we
perform.  And, as the school grows to incorporate other styles, a site that
is able to compare different techniques and fundamental theories of the
arts.  A monumental project, to be sure.

Since I have to go out and advertise the school this weekend, I have been
thinking about all of this stuff today.  I also went around and started
looking at software packages that would help provide the backend to support
this project.  However, it occurred to me that to use any of these software
packages, I would have to go and make sure that they would run on the
servers that host ILMA's website.  So I went looking around for information
about the programming languages and other software installed on the hosting
servers, only to find out that there wasn't really anything installed.  As
far as I can tell, I got nothing.

This means that if I want to change the website into something else, I
either have to get a new hosting provider or upgrade the package with the
existing host that I have.  Either way could end up getting expensive.  I
would very much like to serve a project like this out of my house on one of
my own computers (as I do have the computing power).  But of course, I
don't have the bandwidth or reliability of service to be able to do that. 
I could very easily go into a technical/political/economic rant from here,
but I will not.

At any rate, I will have to shelve this project until the school gets
enough students to make something like this more feasible.  I find it very
frustrating that growth in business comes so slowly.

--------

There are no comments on this post.