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History of PurdueTrumpets.com

The origins of the Purdue Trumpet website trace back to the spring of 2001. We believe it was started by a trumpet named Kyle Zeller who set-up and created the basic outline for the site. The website was started primarily as a recruiting tool to help increase the size and quality of the trumpet section membership. The previous marching season the trumpet section was quite small with barely even 4 ranks. The creation of the website was designed to advertise the benefits of being in the Purdue Trumpet Section, contain information about the audition process and help recruit new members by giving them a better idea of what we do.

In 2002, Ryan “Kaz” Kazmierczak assumed responsibility for management of the trumpet website. Kaz made further additions to the site to enhance the appeal and content of the site. Some additions included member pages, the jumbo hero banner, and a multi-media page for people to download various items.

During the summer of 2005, Kaz was busy completing his degree in pharmacy and could no longer keep the website updated. At the time the student leaders looked for a trumpet member that had background in website design, but no one was interested in volunteering for the job. Since we wanted to continue the recruiting success of the website, I volunteered to research web design and figure out a way to keep the site updated without Kaz here. Since I did not have any web design or coding background, I started by purchasing a basic design-based web software program called Microsoft Frontpage. As we did not have a professional web domain at the time, I then had to transfer all the files from Kaz’s career account web space to my career account web space.

Due to my lack of expertise in web design and the limitations of Frontpage, late in 2005 the trumpets established a secondary website to primarily host a photo gallery. Brian Post was the trumpet primarily responsible for establishing this second website at www.purduetrumpets.com. In order to help update and keep things coordinated, Brian Post gave me co-administrator privileges over www.purduetrumpets.com shortly thereafter. Sometime after the 2006 marching season, purduetrumpets.com crashed due to a failure that was out of our control. Up until this point we had obtained this domain name through a friend of Brian Post’s without having to pay any hosting fees. In the spring of 2007 it became apparent that we would need to purchase the domain name ourselves without relying on the other website to host us. Since Brian Post was graduating, I requested that he release the domain name www.purduetrumpets.com (which was still unavailable) so that I could later use it to transfer the main Purdue Trumpet website off of my career account space. By spring of 2008, I was ready to transfer the website off my career account to www.purduetrumpets.com.

Since the site had gone many years without a major facelift, in spring of 2009 I decided it was time to completely redesign the basic layout of the site. In doing so, I hope to create a more professional looking website that will improve some of the issues I received feedback on.

Managing the Purdue Trumpet website is not an easy task. Keeping it updated year-to-year takes considerably time, skill and communication efforts. The trumpet section cannot always count on having a web design major willing to manage the site as experience has shown. As I will be graduating this semester, it will be up to future members to decide whether they would like to contribute to the website as well. Since graduating members have presented problems in the past, I believe it would be in the best interests of the section to maintain a constant manager of the website. For this to be feasible and continue to be a service to potential, current and alumni members, frequent contributions by active and alumni members are critical. All that is required are simple updates and announcements sent via email and occasional pictures sent by various members. Updating is really not that difficult if everyone contributes. Learning all the intricacies of managing the site, the layout, the file system, the design software, and design techniques is the stuff that really requires quite a bit of experience and/or training.

If you have additional information you would like to share about the history of the Purdue Trumpet Website please email the webmaster at webmaster@purduetrumpets.com. Thank you.