• Special announcements
  
• Keep short to avoid pushing the rest of the content out of sight
• If you want to share a lot of information, create a new page and link to it
  
• Remove by deleting the content if there are no 'special announcements'
  
• Message (gray box)
• This is another place to put a brief message
  
• Make sure it has current and correct information
• Localize, Localize, Localize!
  
• Image and Caption
• A thumbnail image and a short paragraph
  
• May have a link to another page
• Great for grabbing visitors' attention
• Events
• Announce all of your meetings and activities 
  
• The next two upcoming events will appear on the home page
• News Stories
• Write the articles you would if you had a column in a local daily newspaper
• If you do write a column for your paper, post it here, too, to get more mileage out of it.
• The last two edited stories will appear on the home page
• These are syndicated through RSS feeds (or click on "RSS" at the bottom of your county pages) let your local papers know about your news feeds.  This may be an easier way for the news people to keep up on what you are doing and provide them with ideas for stories.

• Message (gray box)
• This is a place to put a message about what you do in your county in related to this category
  
• Make sure it has current and correct information
• Localize it!
  
• Image and Caption
• A thumbnail image and a short paragraph related to this category
  
• May have a link to another page
• Great for promoting an event or program
• Events
• Announce all of your meetings and activities in this category
  
• The next two upcoming events in this category are displayed
• Events can be assigned to multiple categories
  
• News Stories
• The last two edited stories in this category are displayed
• To remove, you need to delete all the stories ever posted in this category or post two new stories
  
• Featured Links
• Links to other web pages or site related to this topic
• Make sure they are appropriate for your county
• Localize! Remove links that aren't apropriate for you county and add links that are appropriate.
  

• You can create as many new pages as you like.
• Link to them from any place on your county web site!

Why Mac over Windows?

The issue with Windows is support. We are an IT unit with only eight IT professionals. Three people are assigned to administer and support county systems and networks for around 1000 extension personnel in 80 or so locations across the state. Every person in our group has past experience supporting Windows PCs. We know for a fact it's a high touch endeavor. Because we can't physically go to your offices to provide support at the time that it's needed, anything we do has to be supportable from a distance. With a support ratio of 3:1000, it also has to be very scalable.

So far we really like Macs and Apple OS X. We have enough confidence that we can support 1000 or so Macs to continue testing. Our comfort with supporting Apple OS X is partly because of our experience with Unix and Linux and partly because we know of other organizations who are successfully doing so with support ratios similar to ours. Still we have more testing to do before we make any decisions.

Other factors make Apple appealing. The operating system is easy to learn about and use. Apple offers a great array of multimedia tools built right in, as well as imaging and remote support tools. In Windows the latter are an afterthought.

EIT is fortunate to have computer support people with an exceptional ability to find workable solutions within any number of constraints. We hope we can make this work, because it would offer more flexibility and functionality to your offices. That's our bottom line.

For more information on the EIT Macintosh Project, visit the Macintosh Project Wiki.