website: Radio Guintan

client: Geekcorps/IESC

URL: http://guintanbamako.radio.org.ml

Under the Web Services branch of the community radio project, Geekcorps Mali needed to produce websites for each of its partner radio stations—potentially as many as fifteen. The website had to be

• easily updated by someone with no knowledge of HTML, CSS, etc.
• easily replicated and quickly customized for many partner stations
• maintained using free, open-source software

Another Geekcorps volunteer and I had already selected a free, open-source content management system (CMS), SPIP, as the best tool for managing our project websites. All the content of a SPIP site is managed with a user-friendly web-based interface.

My next task was to take the default SPIP templates and customize them in such a way that they could be easily replicated. I made a three-column CSS layout, using no tables, that would work well for all the sites; I chose a simple color scheme based on three colors; and I made a coordinated banner graphic.

On the inside pages, the menu icons and colors change to indicate which section you are in.

The site does not take advantage of all SPIP's features but does offer a site search and a tool for commenting on articles.

Replicating the website would just require copying the templates and, after choosing the three colors for the new site, creating a new banner of the same dimensions and doing a search-and-replace in the stylesheets for the color codes.