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In Dick Grady AC7EL writes:


Steve,

I agree. It is bizarre that people would need a webinar to learn how
to find stuff.

Training can be useful, even in organizations full of experts, to
quickly and efficiently get everyone up to a baseline of knowledge, as
well as be able to get/contribute consistent results. I certainly
expect that most amateurs, and ARRL members, are technically savvy, and
can quickly come up to speed with new systems and technologies. Those
like you and me that "grew up" with technologies like the Internet in
their personal and professional lives may find them to be intuitive.
Others may not. Not everyone might be able to quickly self-train, and
the alternative to accessible one-to-many training like webinars may be
to devote a lot of individual customer service support to those who
might need extra assistance.

The old site wasn't broken. "If it ain't broke, don't
fix it." It's just like when Microsoft or some other software
company comes out with a new and "improved" program or operating
system. You have to learn how to use it all over again.

Welcome to the world of the technology life cycle! Though perhaps
you've been here before...

Unfortunately systems don't exist in a vacuum, nor do they have infinite
lifespans. They require a lot of supporting infrastructure, including
hardware, operating systems, applications, as well as trained
administrators and users. Each provider of the individual pieces may
choose to improve (or try to improve) their products periodically, and
make obsolete, or "end-of-life" their previous versions. Finite
resources means having to make sometimes difficult tradeoffs between
supporting the old and developing the new. Hardware might not be
available on the new or reconditioned market, or have parts available,
or be able to run current versions of operating systems. Operating
systems may no longer have security updates, documentation, and training
provided by their vendors. Same with applications. Current
applications may not run on old operating systems and hardware, or
vice-versa. Trying to maintain in-house training for old systems in the
face of lack of support from vendors and turnover in staff can be
daunting. Maybe the ARRL was facing all of these challenges, and
decided that this was a good time to upgrade. Perhaps the new site is
much easier to extend and support new advanced features. I would even
be sympathetic to the need for an upgrade if the new site was
feature-neutral, but was easier or less expensive to maintain, or had
higher performance and capacity.

While the overall long-term progress is commendable, there are those
speed bumps when doing transitions and upgrades. I at least credit the
ARRL for trying to run both systems in parallel during a test phase,
then cutting over when the site substantially worked (even taking the
hit and embarrassment when it was clear that they needed to delay
rollout due to performance issues). Internal systems at the ARRL have
been rolled out this way for many years. It's only now more visible
when applied to directly member-accessible resources like their web
site.

Somewhat imperfect analogy: It's like asking why didn't we stick with
the '57 Chevy or the Saturn V rocket (or the Drake transceiver), as
those were notable examples of what worked well in the past. The
general answer is that those examples were quite serviceable for their
time, but technology improves and is incorporated into new products.
Blueprints and other institutional knowledge for '57 Chevy's and Saturn
V rockets exist, but unless you have huge warehouses of original
New-Old-Stock (NOS) parts, or existing factories that can make "vintage"
components (anything from transistors to just era-specific screws and
bolts), you may wind up having to re-engineer, re-integrate, and
re-certify a design with currently available components, and at that
point, you may as well have started with a clean sheet design in the
first place.

(The analogy is imperfect, as I know that small-scale boutique or
cottage industries have licensed the '57 Chevy tooling and blueprints
from GM and can provide identical, sometimes improved, versions of
nearly 100% of the original parts catalog, including a full body, for a
'57 Chevy. But that's still not practical or cost-effective for
large-scale production of something to be used for modern, everyday
transportation. Especially if it has to meet current safety and
reliability standards. Drake ran out of parts for some of its legendary
amateur radio equipment some years back, is not planning to reproduce
them, nor are third-party vendors stepping up to do so.)

And many links on the site don't work.

It seems that that's the biggest "bug" in the new system. That, and not
making sure that all existing direct links from the old site, that might
be stored in members' bookmark files (such as the A-1 operators page),
had redirection from old names to new so that members were not
experiencing broken links. At the very least, all old addresses that
were deleted or modified should have been redirected to the main page,
instead of returning a "404" Error with no further information.

How come only Midwest Division members get to have a webinar?
What about us out West? Or New Englander? Or Southerners?

It appears that the Atlantic Division leadership took the initiative to
set up these webinars for the benefit of their members, using volunteers
and free or inexpensive on-line resources (i.e., it's not a fully-funded
ARRL-wide service yet). They have done webinars on other
amateur-radio-related topics in the past, not just "simple" ones like
ARRL web site training, and are likely to do others in the future. They
seem to be treating it as a pilot/proof-of-concept with the intention of
gradually rolling it out to other Divisions. Immediate expansion to
everyone may not be practical due to limited current resources, such as
the maximum number of attendees that can be accommodated at the
gotomeeting.com site. I think that it's a commendable initiative, and I
choose to view the present glass as half-full rather than half-empty,
and look forward to when it can be filled.

Yesterday, I tried to use the Field Day site locator to locate Field
Day sites. The search function didn't work. But I was able to
mouse-drag the map to the area I wanted.

Was the Field Day site locator available on the old site? If not, then
maybe that's an example of a new capability that wasn't practical to
roll out on the old site. I agree that it should have been fully
functional when rolled out to production, but the fact that it was
available and partially working shows that the ARRL is planning
improvements over the old site.

Dick AC7EL

- --
73, Paul W. Schleck, K3FU

http://www.novia.net/~pschleck/
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On Thu, 10 Jun 2010 22:38:46 EDT, Steve Reinhardt
wrote:

Is it just me, or does it seem wrong somehow, that you need a webinar to
teach you how to find stuff on a website? Especially since all the stuff
was easy to find in the old, lame, outdated website that just did it's jo
b?

Could someone help me to understand the philosophy here?

73,
Steve
W1KF


On 6/9/2010 9:56 AM, ARRL Members Only Web site wrote:
Midwest Division ARRL Members have been invited to attend an online
Webinar on How to Use the New ARRL Web Site. The Webinar will be on
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