Today all unit Webmasters received the announcement that SLA will begin offering a new web hosting plan starting in January 2011!
SLA Board of Directors member Daniel Lee has been working with unit Webmasters over the past several months and here is an update:
- SLA has purchased web hosting from award-winning host provider HostGator;
- Wordpress will be promoted as the CMS of choice;
- A professional Wordpress theme has been designed specifically for SLA units and will be included as part of a basic hosting package; and
- The price for the basic package will be $40 per year and will include 24/7 technical support provided by HostGator, email accounts, MySQL databases, FTP Accounts, an easy-to-use and flexible Control Panel, and a 99.9% uptime guarantee.
The plan is to pilot the new service with a select set of units who self-identified as early adopters. The pilot will run during October, November, and December. Based on the feedback from the pilot, the service and the Wordpress theme will be adjusted.
At Leadership Summit in January, Daniel will demonstrate the new service, including the new WordPress theme and, at that point, the service will be made available to the entire SLA community. There is also a group of Wordpress Super Administrators who have volunteered to help guide the units through the process of conversion in 2011. The goal is to have all SLA units who are currently hosted by SLA converted to the new service by December 2011.
When this project began, Daniel had five objectives in mind:
- Provide a stable and modern hosting service to all chapters, divisions, and caucuses;
- Design a brand standard template for all units to use;
- Make the service affordable;
- Promote a common content management system we can all use, understand and build upon by developing our own tools; and
- Start to build a community for SLA's webmasters.
Webmasters will be providing feedback to Daniel and his Super Administrator team over the next several weeks. This is a service that you and your Webmasters have asked for. You will want to be at Leadership Summit when we all see this dream realized.