Well, it started as the idle whim of the Society's Press Officer (the author), an IT professional recovering from major back surgery and thus extremely bored!
The general idea was to have a World Wide Web site to publicise the Society's activities, to include the current year's syllabus and establish links to other photographic Web sites of interest to the amateur photographer. It was hoped that the site could also double up as a jump station to other Knutsford-related sites (this still has to come to fruition as there don't seem to be many of these yet!).
Additionally, a Web site could provide a new point of contact into the Knutsford Photographic Society via the inclusion of an e-mail address link in the Society Web page.
The first steps were to decide that there really was some point in pursuing the notion of a Web site, and then to gain a full understanding of what the Internet was, and all its components. Being lucky enough to be working in IT this was relatively easy as the Internet has been the topic of much discussion in the computing press. Yours truly also had "on tap" a number of colleagues and friends who were "computer minded" and it was not too difficult to find people eager to offer demos of their own Internet connectivity.
Don't despair if you're not a computer whiz, or don't know anyone who is! Firstly, getting to grips with the Internet is comparatively simple (honest!) and there's now plenty of help available in reference books (either new or from libraries) and from the growing abundance of Internet magazines on newsagents' shelves. Also, try dropping in to your nearest Cybercafe for a practise "surf". Whilst there you could always have a look at the Knutsford Photographic Society site at :
OK - so you've decided that it is a good idea to put your club on the Internet and you've got yourself a PC and a modem; how do you actually enter Cyberspace?
If your club is going to operate from an academic establishment, or camping out on a benevolent employer's server, life is made somewhat easier. For the rest of us, the first thing to do is to find a "service provider". The service provider is the company whose telephone number your modem dials and which then links your PC into the Internet. It is also on the service provider's server (a type of computer) that your club's Web page will sit. When examining the address of the Knutsford Photographic Society's Web address (http://www.u-net.com/thehaven/~kpshome.htm) the "u-net.com" indicates that the service provider that the Knutsford Photographic Society uses is a firm called "U-Net".
There are now plenty of service providers listed in Internet magazines, but do make sure that that you find one whose telephone number (the one that your modem will dial) is classed as a local call from your own STD code - check the front of your BT telephone directory for local codes to be on the safe side. Also ensure that the service provider you select includes some "free" space on their server as part of the package, as this is where your Web page will be physically located.
Finally, decide who will hold your access to the Internet i.e. the club member/officer with the software and password and thus the person who will have the ability/responsibility to set up and keep your club Web page up to date. If you are say, based at a college, and/or have a number of Net-literate members, you could pass the responsibility of site maintenance from club member to club member. Alternatively (and this is the Knutsford Photographic Society approach) you could have a club official with their own private Net access at home, who donates some of their personal Web space entitlement for the club's use, maintains the page and also allows their personal e-mail address to double up as the club's e-mail address.
So, you're all set up and have joined the Internet community. All that remains is to establish that Web site. Whilst contemplating the look and feel that you want your site to have, at the same time check that you have some means of sending your web page code to your service provider's server once it has been written. Knutsford Photographic Society uses FTP (File Transfer Protocol) software, which is freely available from magazines and the Internet itself.
How do you produce your Web page? Firstly design it. I'd suggest having a look at other Web sites (of all sorts) to get a feel for the sorts of things you can do (and there are links to a number of other photo-related sites from the Knutsford Photographic Society Web site). Next code it - this, I'm afraid, involves gaining some familiarity with the coding language HTML (Hypertext Mark-up Language), but again there are many books and magazines which simplify this greatly for the lay person. There are also an increasing number of software tools to do a lot of the hard work for you (for example, the version of this article that appears on the Knutsford Photographic Society Web site was largely written using the standard Microsoft Word 6 word processing package, and then turned into HTML at the press of a button using a free add-on tool available for Word 6).
The easiest starting place is to clone someone else's Web page, preferably one which bears some resemblance to the end result you'd like to achieve. Do be aware of any copyright statements though. Feel free to use the Knutsford Photographic Society page as a skeleton to get you started.
Having built your Web page on your own PC, and you are happy with it, publish it by sending it down the telephone line via your modem, using FTP software, to your service providers server. Then you're there! and your club has a presence on the World Wide Web.
Unfortunately, the benefits of the Knutsford Photographic Society's Web presence to its members have, to date, been pretty minimal. Most of the members are aware of its existence (as their Press Officer drones on about it from time to time). It has also provided some entertainment at a member's house during one of our summer social evenings, although, having looked at their Society's page and travelled to other photo-related sites, members were equally interested in surfing around the Web to find information about their respective holiday destinations planned for the summer!
It is, however, not surprising that our members are not collectively brimming over with enthusiasm about the Internet and their club's presence as so few of them have Internet access. At the time of writing, other than the author, only two other members have access via work, and that's about it. Other major milestones seem to have been when one member, whilst visiting her daughter (in the USA) looked at the Knutsford Photographic Society page via her daughter's PC, whilst another, unsure of what a forthcoming meeting's topic was scheduled to be, rang his son, who has Web access and asked him to have a look at the on-line syllabus and report back.
I fear that either interest in the Web site will only grow as younger generations are recruited into the Society, or when the Internet becomes so much a part of everyday life that people of all ages and interests obtain home PCs and get themselves on-line.
I suppose that one could argue that if something a club does is of little benefit to its members, then there's little value in that activity. However, although I am obviously biased as an IT-type, as the club's Press Officer, I could just as easily argue that the presence of the Web page is paying off in terms of the additional publicity that the club has already received in the first 6 months of its Web presence.
The Society is seen as being a progressive club, as one of the first UK amateur camera clubs with an Internet presence (see the Knutsford Photographic Society site for a list of the other few like-minded clubs that we have managed to tracked down to date). The presence has brought us into contact with other camera clubs, both UK and world wide, of whose existence we would not previously had been aware. The Knutsford Photographic Society (located in Cheshire) has for the first time been invited to take part in an exhibition in London, by sending its photographs down-the-line. Also, one of the latest visitors to the Society, newly moved into the area, only knew of our existence due to the Internet. We were especially pleased to receive congratulations on our site from Practical Photography magazine's Development Editor, and also useful feedback, and subsequent dialogues, with Photon magazine. We have even been invited to give a talk to a students Photographic Society some 200 miles away, a club that located us through the Internet. Judging by the increasing amount of e-mail being received from people living in Knutsford, the profile of the Society within the town is also being raised (mainly because of the limited number of provides that an Internet Search Engine returns when searching on "Knutsford"!).
Yet, We have only just begun.......
All the above has been achieved without any real active promotion of the Society's Web page on the part of the author. The main reason for holding back has been that, as a society involved in the visual arts, it would only seem reasonable for our Web pages to hold some of our work. To date, the club has not had the facilities to scan photographs for inclusion on the Web site, a situation which will, however, resolve itself imminently.
Once the site does include some of our own work (assuming that members are willing to contribute and understand the copyright implications relating to their work), the plan is to launch the site properly, including publicity through the photographic related Newsgroups.
The Society will then be able to participate in on-line exhibitions and other virtual events and will have then truly arrived in Cyberspace.
Carol Sparkes
Press Officer, Knutsford Photographic Society
December 1995
Copyright © 1995 The Knutsford Photographic Society (contents); Carol Sparkes (source code)
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