Website Upgrade In Progress!
By Ron Pace, Website Coordinator
and
Wyn Bryant, Website Technical Administrator
(NEW Updated Info February 1, 2005!)

The FAPA website is considered one of the premier websites among the AAPA chapters maintaining websites. Our mission has been simple: To provide an informational website that is easy to navigate and use. To that end the website does not have a lot of bells and whistles that many sites have that take time to download and take up memory space and slow you down when surfing a site. It is not an entertainment site. We feel that this is the best approach for our website and the comments given to us over the past four years indicate the membership and visitors to our site overwhelmingly agree.

The Board of Directors was informed at the November 2004 Board meeting that we would be changing our web hosting affiliation and technical administrators in the near future. We greatly appreciate the excellent support and service provided to FAPA the last four years by Web Fitness Consultants, Inc. But as our organization has grown and its’ needs changed, our association management firm, Kautter Management Group, Inc. (KMG) has also grown and changed. They now have the ability and personnel to provide website management to FAPA. Suffice it to say that there were many technical and financial advantages for FAPA and KMG that warranted the change in website management firms, thus the decision was made to do so at this time.

This move has now taken place as of December 5th, 2004. It will take about three to six months to complete all the changes and updates and test all the pages for correctness, making sure the links all work and pages are updated as needed. If you find a problem, or see information that you feel is incorrect or out of date, please send us an email at FAPA@fapaonline.org outlining the problem you encountered. Please email us and do not call since the email provides written documentation for our technical staff to evaluate and correct the problem.

You will no longer find the Members Only section on the website. This has been replaced with the MyFAPA section. For FAPA members, your initial login information was e-mailed to you earlier in the week. If you didn’t receive the e-mail, your username is your e-mail address and you can use the ‘Password Lookup’ feature to have your password e-mailed to you.

The MyFAPA section is unique to each member. The office will be able to place messages to each member that is specific to them in their private MyFAPA page, such as membership dues renewal notification and receipt of dues payment, conference registration confirmation and other such tasks.

Please note that MyFAPA is not just for members! In fact, you are required to create an account to order the prescriptive practice video, place an online job posting, register for a conference, sign up for our conference notification service, or to join FAPA. However, we'd encourage anyone to create an account that would like to receive communications from us.

New changes in effect now include:

• SSL certificate for secure communications has been installed. The website is now officially a "secure" site. Any transactions conducted on the FAPA website are as secure as we can make it for you with today's technology.
• Members can now update their personal information online, such as name, address and phone number changes and email address changes. Once a member has made an online change to update information it is automatically done to all database applications right then, at that very moment in real time. No waiting for a staff member to enter it later!
• The online, group email, membership, and non-membership databases have been merged into one database which will eliminate a great deal of data entry time for KMG and the Website Coordinator. This will greatly enhance our communication capability, and give the Membership Committee access to current and accurate information.
• The online Membership Directory has been changed and members can now search the membership directory in multiple ways. One can search by name, location, specialty, etc. And it will give you the list in more names per page. Members still maintain the right to not have information made available online. You can do this when you renew your dues. But remember that most of this information is available by law thru the Florida Board of Medicine website to anyone seeking it as a matter of public record.
• Regional Directors thru special Admin Functions can now change the names of Area Reps on an as needed basis.
• Regional Directors and Area Reps will be able to post their regional and local meetings directly in the Current Events and Happenings pages.
• Regional Directors and Area Reps have access to contact information on all non-members thru the database to aid them in recruiting new members.

• Credit card charges online will be done thru a secure online service so that charges are made directly to your card at the time of the transaction. No credit card info will be transmitted to the FAPA office. The office will receive only verification that charges were approved to be paid to FAPA.
• Committees will be able to set up group email accounts thru the office to enhance communications.
• In the near future we will have a Bulletin Board for PAs in Florida to post comments and exchange ideas about professional matters affecting the PA profession in Florida.
• CME Online courses are coming by mid-summer we hope. But be patient this is a very time consuming project so it may take a bit longer.
• Expanded communication functions for Board members and Area Reps to improve and ease communications.

As always, your comments and suggestions are welcomed by the Website Coordinator and the Website Technical Staff. Email us at FAPA@fapaonline.org.

Special Note From Ron Pace:
Although I write most of the articles, I must give credit where credit is due. The majority of credit for work on this website upgrade belongs to Wyn Bryant, the KMG Technical Staff person. He has done and will do the complex technical programming that is required. As the Website Coordinator my job is mainly one of communications with members, developing ideas for improvement, writing articles, soliciting articles from others, and proofing what is done, and making sure that what we do continues to keep our website user friendly for those of you out there who are "computer challenged."