Website Management "First Principles"

Here are some basic “first principles” that guide my thinking and my work over the last year and a half. 

• First priority is survival of the website. The website and forums are the face of the USCA to the world and must be protected. This means backups, hacker protection, testing changes on a staging site, and rapidly installing software updates when they become available. 
• Protect users from exposure to spam links in forum posts. When spammers get through the initial defenses they can post in the forums with external links to potentially dangerous places. Unsophisticated users might be tempted to click on a link and get caught up in a support scam or software hijacking. 
• Implement and maintain common web standards and best practices. 
  • Minimize customizations and specialized software development. 
  • Keep the website, forum applications, and IT infrastructure ‘inheritable’ for future webmasters. Customization means complexity and dependence on developers and third parties. 
• Build a world-class website for sidecarists. 
  • Simplify processes for people to join the USCA and forums. 
  • Provide a compelling case for sidecaring. Stories, pictures, articles. 
  • Build the website into a sidecar information hub for many resources. 
  • Build a library of educational and entertaining content. 
    • Library of sidecar references and documents
    • Sidecarist magazine archive (30 years)
    • “Sidecar Talk” Yahoo Groups archive (10 years)
    • 21 years of forum posts with attachments
    • References to other useful websites
    • Collect useful and interesting content for a "Members-only" section to inspire people to pay for USCA membership.