Anne Dougherty

Online Content Manager: Association of Trial Lawyers of America

Project: Online Content Production Guides & Staff Training

My first task as Online Content Manager for ATLA was to create processes and procedures for the day to day management of the Association's main web site in a situation where the responsibilities for creation of content and the coding of pages was spread across the organization's thirteen departments.

In addition to establishing procedures and defining roles for individuals in the departments and within the Online Team, I also created an Online Style Guide which described the general rules to which any content on the site was required to conform. To make the style guide and additional resources available to the Content Production Coordinators who were actually coding the pages for each department, I created a small intranet-type site on one of ATLA's internal development servers.

Online Content Manager: Association of Trial Lawyers of America

Best practices and education

Since pages for the ATLA site were going to be constructed by a number of different people across the organization, I felt that the online style guide could not confine itself simply to just how to use what HTML tags when.

I included sections on best writing practices for the web as well as practical information on the best way to work with documents generated by word processing programs, information about structuring documents with HTML, the best way for the Content Production Coordinators to check their work, and what procedure they should follow to get their pages and ancillary materials posted to the public web server. In addition, I created a list using ATLA's Lyris software so that Content Production Coordinators across the organization could network and use each other as a resource as their skills developed and improved.

Online Content Manager: Association of Trial Lawyers of America

Using predetermined technology and tools

In order to facilitate the proper coding of web pages for atla.org it was decided prior to my arrival at the association that all staff members would use Dreamweaver 4.0 as their primary tool when working on the web site. Because most staff members tasked with maintaining departmental pages were not familiar with Dreamweaver I provided a suggested layout for the basic tools they would need when making changes to their pages.

Online Content Manager: Association of Trial Lawyers of America

Another challenge in working with non-web specialists on the ATLA site was to provide an easy way for them to understand the concepts behind and execution of the separation of structure and presentation when coding pages.

I created a visual guide to the ATLA global css file that not only explicitly displayed each tag and class available for use but also provided explanations and examples of those tags as they were being used on the site.

In late 2008, the Association launched a new web site under their new name, the American Association for Justice.