By Craig Steffen
I’m extremely pleased to report that there were no web site problems to speak of this year, and there were some significant improvements. We didn’t get hacked at all, even a little bit, and all of our information is secure.
Our web host, inmotionhosting.com, remains awesome, and this WordPress web site works very well for our needs. Our payment processor, Square, continues to be excellent and reliable. Both of those give extremely good service for not very much money.
KPA conference registration this year was via a new (to us at least) web form provider called “JotForm” (jotform.com). Their forms are super-easy to create, and they integrated directly with Square for registration payments with no hassle whatsoever. They are somewhere between fairly cheap and free; I know what I paid for but it’s possible we don’t even need that high of a membership tier.
We think we’ve ironed out the problems that we had with Zoom the first session of last year’s conference. You’ll know by now if not. We were able to do the meeting with fewer Zoom licenses because we were able to configure our meetings more carefully. Thanks very much to the dedicated meeting hosts that make this all possible!
We would love to get people discussing KPA topics in the forum that we’ve installed on the web site. This would be a great place for people to talk about and discuss topics or emphases of future KPA conferences, and maybe even good locations for the KPA conference. We (the exec committee) will try to get some discussions seeded there, then we may ping folks to ask for their input.
Oh, and Rebecca and I have been working since I got this job on taking the important pieces of web infrastucture and replacing them with ones that non-computer-specialists can handle. I think we’re basically at that point. I’m happy to continue as webmaster, but it is now at the point that I could hand off webmaster duties to someone else in the organization. All of the tools are reasonably browser-based and configurable by menus and I think non-specialists could handle them.
We hope you’re having a lovely conference! We’re looking forward to KPA 2023!