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Purpose

This is the primary site for the STC Washington, DC – Baltimore (WDCB) Chapter. This site replaces the old one at archives.stcwdc.org/index.shtml, which is now an archives site. Companion sites are the

• WDCB Events & News
• WDCB Jobs Board
• WDCB Chapter main site
• WDCB Competition
• Chapter Archives (1993-2012)

This website provides an ongoing presence and communication for chapter members and others in the field of technical communication. This site identifies membership benefits, chapter information, educational resources, speakers' handouts and presentations, community service activities, and many more items of interest to the technical communicator and others interested in the field. It serves as a public relations tool for chapter members and others who want to know about events such as competitions, meetings, workshops, and seminars / webinars sponsored by the chapter and by the Society for Technical Communication.

The chapter provides chapter members with networking tools such as the Events & News website; the monthly Announcements mailing list; and several social media groups such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Tools are provided for the technical communicator in the form of links to Web resources for developing technical materials, information about the career of technical communication, job announcements, and more. The archives website provides an historical platform and repository for chapter records, awards, honors and achievements, pre-2012 competition winners, photos, past presidents, and past events.

Do I Need to Register?

Registration is not required to use this site.

Contact Information

Website Team

The site was initiated, designed, and coded by Cynthia A. Lockley. The website is maintained by the Website Team Committee. The committee is led by the Website Team Committee Manager (see the super-administrator job description.

Team members include:

Volunteers with HTML5, PHP7+, CSS2 / CSS3, and WordPress.org experience are welcome to join the team.

Contributors, Authors, and Guest Authors are encouraged to participate in the Events & News website.

How to Contact STC Headquarters

Web Host

Looking for Web and WordPress hosting? Visit SiteGround. Send comments about any problems with the functional performance of this website using the Contact Us form or send feedback to Web Diva

Site Design and History

The original Washington, DC – Baltimore (WDCB) Chapter website went online in March 1995 coded in HTML 2 using black and white graphics and tables for page layout in preparation for the 1995 STC Annual Conference hosted by the Washington, DC Chapter. During 2013-2014, the website was converted to a WordPress.org platform using the Twenty-Eleven theme. As of January 2016, the website uses a child theme of the accessibility-ready Aaron theme for WordPress. Over the years, the website grew from a single HTML 2 flat-file website into a collection of subsites that use WordPress.org 6.1.1+, HTML5, CSS3, PHP7+, and a little Javascript. By hand-coding accessibility enhancements into the basic theme, the website is designed to be useable by all users.

With suggestions from chapter members and others, the content of the website enhances the Society's stc.org website by containing information about technical communication and how to be a technical communicator. It encompasses some educational, instructional, job announcements, and career guidance material that is not always found on other STC community websites. The entire site includes two WordPress CMS websites: the main site (WDCB) and the Competition site; two WordPress blogging-format websites: Events & News and the Jobs Board.; a flat-file archives site; and a WordPress blogging-format Development site for testing plugins and changes before using them in the production sites. Site awards are listed on the Site Awards page.

History of How We Got Where We Are

The original Washington, DC – Baltimore (WDCB) Chapter website went online in March 1995 coded in HTML 2 using tables for layout and black and white graphics in preparation for the 1995 STC Annual Conference hosted by the Washington, DC Chapter. Over the years, the site grew into a state of the art accessible CMS website that used XHTML Transitional Strict, CSS2, Unix server side includes (ssi), .shtml security, and javascript.

A jobs announcement page was a part of that original site. By 1998, the site also contained a section where chapter members could have their resumes posted. A government agency requested a list of local technical communication businesses / independents that they could use to send out requests for proposals (RFPs). It was a large effort for the website team to manually post and maintain the job announcements and resumes.

in 2006, a WordPress website was created for the Jobs Board WordPress in a subdomain of the original website using the WPJobBoard plugin. This allowed job seekers and employers to freely register on the website to self-maintain their resumes and job announcements.

In 2007, when chapter members wanted more interaction with the website and the ability to post articles, a WordPress blog was added to another subdomain of the website. A site manager was appointed to the blog who registered chapter members as authors or contributors. A handful of people wrote articles for the blog in the first years. Most of these posts did not generate comments so the amount of excited participation and interaction was much lower than expected. Most new authors wrote one article only. To facilitate more contributions, two forms were added to the website for people who did not want to have to register on the site: a form to submit an event and a form to submit an article. The input was sent to the site manager and the social media manager for review, edits, approval, and posting. We got one book report out of it.

In 2009, the two WordPress subdomains broke out into standalone WordPress websites. One used the paid WPJobBoard plugin that ran a Jobs Board that employers and chapter job seekers could interact with and maintain resumes and job announcements for free. A second WordPress website, using the same theme, used a WordPress paid plugin, The Events Calendar, that provided an events calendar and ways to announce events. The blog was deactivated and combined with the events WordPress website for concurrent posts and comments about Events & News.

By 2012, the full chapter website comprised an accessible XHTML flat-file site for chapter information including all the competition instructions and winners lists, and two WordPress sites using WordPress 4.4.1, HTML5, CSS3, PHP5, and some Javascript. The XHTML site was redesigned to appear similar to the theme chosen for the two WordPress sites.

Our Jobs Board was free for Washington, DC metropolitan area job seekers and employers but by 2013 and the slump in the economy, chapter members stopped using the Jobs Board website to post their resumes and employers stopped posting job announcements to it. STC wanted all chapters to direct people to the Society's Careers website, which charges employers to post job announcements. The self-maintaining board was converted to a static site with a home page of RSS feeds from various employment services, a page of local job announcements looking for WDCB chapter members, and a page of additional local and national employment resources in an effort to supply some employment information to chapter members.

During 2013-2014, the website was converted to an all WordPress platform with four separate websites using the Twenty-Eleven theme to have the same look and feel of a unified site transparent to the user. This involved a major restructuring of the website and converting all Unix server-side includes to PHP includes, converting XHTML to HTML5, and updating CSS2 to CSS3. The chapter's large competition information was broken out into its own WordPress CMS website. Other parts of the old flat-file site were archived

• Newsletter issues (made obsolete by the Events & News website)
• Past chapter events (1994-2012); detailed event directions, maps, and parking information
• Available competition winners lists from the three communication competitions we held:
  • Austin T. Brown high school technical writing scholarship (1962-2009).
  • Shirley G. Carter college student essay awards (1991-2009).
  • The professional technical communication competitions (1968-2012).

The Archives pages were not converted to WordPress and are .shtml flat files. The past events information is useful to event planners to review what has been done and may be of interest for future events.

Accessibility Design and Features

The Accessibility Design and Features page describes the Document Type Designation (DTD), navigation, fonts, style sheets, colors, Web conventions, and other items used to make this site an enjoyable and useful experience for everyone. The following information is provided on the Accessibility Features page.

• Website Conventions
• Accessibility Features
• Accessibility Resources

Chapter and STC Logo Graphics

See the Chapter and STC Logo Graphics page for a variety of graphics you can use for adding links back to the Washington, DC – Baltimore (WDCB) Chapter pages in your site.

Operating Expenses Fundraising

Use one of the PayPal Donate buttons shown on the left to donate for events, competitions, website expenses, and operating expenses to pay by credit card on the website through PayPal. A PayPal Payments button, as shown on the right, is provided in the Event Registration and other forms to make your payments. For information about how to use PayPal, see the PayPal FAQ.

PDF File Information

Some hypertext links may take you to Portable Document Format (PDF) files you can view in your Web browser. Your modern browser may no longer support a PDF helper application. The Acrobat/Acrobat Reader plug-in for web browsers relies on the cross-platform plug-in architecture NPAPI, which had been supported by all major web browsers for over a decade. The following browsers have dropped support for NPAPI, and therefore Acrobat/Acrobat Reader plug-in does not work on these browsers anymore to display the PDF.

• Mozilla Firefox (v52 and above)
• Google Chrome (September 2015 release onwards)
• Apple Safari (v12 and above)
• Microsoft Edge

For more information, see Change in support for Acrobat and Reader plug-ins in modern web browsers.

If you can't view the PDF files or you get an error message, download and install the latest version of the FREE Acrobat® Reader™ plug-in for your browser: https://get.adobe.com/reader/otherversions. Some PDF files are saved with accessibility and search capabilities for screen readers. Acrobat Pro DC can compare two versions of a PDF to review all differences, turn scanned documents into editable, searchable PDFs, redact to permanently remove sensitive information in PDFs, and validate and fix PDFs for ISO and accessibility standards

PDF file links are marked by a (.pdf) following the link and may also include the size of the PDF with the .pdf file extension at the end of the link (250 KB .pdf). PDF files are extremely compact, platform-independent, and easy to create. They offer design control, print-ready documents, and an endless array of authoring applications. PDF is an extension of the Encapsulated PostScript format that allows hypertext linking. Some PDF files may contain hypertext links that take you to another location in the PDF file or to another Web page. The hypertext links are indicated by a hot spot in the PDF file where the cursor changes to a hand with a pointing finger. Use the Back button to return to previous pages in the Web browser or to return from the PDF viewer to the HTML viewer.

See also Download Help for information about downloading PDFs and ZIP files.

Javascript

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Disclaimers and Copyrights

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