I have a question for you guys who run a multi-year site,

If a person went to your school for 3 years and they did not graduate from that school, which year do year should they sign up under, last year? first year?

I am also confused as to just how the multi year site works, I noticed that you can have icons to select which year you want to enter, but when you upload the names of your classmates do they all go into one page and then they select which year they want to be in, or do they have to go to a certain year?

Is there an example site that you can go to see how it is handled behind the scene?

My classmates profile page is getting bigger and bigger with each year that I get loaded....Help

Randy Jennings

Check my site www.carolinamilitary.org

Randy Jennings wrote:

Hi Randy,
In high school a person is a member of a graduating class, for instance, class of 68. The students were class of 68 even when they entered HS in 1964. Therefore, we put the classmate that didn't graduate in the class that he was a member of.

On the multi-year sites, you can choose to separate the class years into separate pages. Check out my site and look at my Classes and Classmates page. You will see the years on that page, and classmates need to click on their year to find their name in the class list.

Here is a demo multi-site that you can play around with to see how it works:

www.classcreator.com/Abbeville-AL-2000-2010
Login: mail@classcreator.com
Password: multidemo

Hi Marian

First of all thanks for responding.

I am going to use myself as an example, I was sent to military school in my freshman year, that was 1962/63 it was the only year that I went to military school. I graduated high school in 1966, so if I am understanding you correctly, I would be put in the class of 1966 at the military school. I think that would be very confusing if I was looking to sign in to the classmates profile. Some of our classmates at the military school were post graduate students and 7th grade students, I am managing this alumni association and we span a ten year span of classes. We probably had over 1500 classmates, if what you are saying is correct, they would have to search through 10 different classes to find there names to sign in.

Would it not be better to tell them to sign in on the last year they attended the school? I hope I am not trying to be too critical. The ages now of the classmates that went to school at this school would be between 58-69 and I don't want to confuse things with multi years but the pages will get way too long if I don't.

Thanks

Randy

Randy,

There's a brand new wonderful toy on my site, a search tool on the profiles page. I don't see it on your profiles page, so perhaps it is only on multi-year sites. It works great! Your classmates can put their name into the search box and it will bring the name up from any list.

I don't know what to tell you about how to categorize, I would still use the year that they would have graduated had they been there (do you know the last year of their attendance?). You could put a direction on your home page to tell them how to search for their name, however you decide to categorize.

Thank you again, I like the fact that you have a page for teachers and staff and I like the fact that you have the year after the classmates name. You have a great site and I appreciate you taking the time to share it with me.

Randy

Ours is a really big multi-year site covering 1907-2009. We have people who left school before graduating, who graduated earlier than their original class, who got held back a year, or who left and came back later, graduating with a different class than they started with.

When in doubt we usually leave it up to the classmate to decide which group of students they most identified with and let that determine their would-have-been graduation year. Usually they're pretty clear about that. Tricky when they have good friends in two different classes.

It's best to keep them with the class where they had the most contact so classmates can find each other. On a multi-year site they can still visit the other classes to see younger & older friends and siblings.

We also ask these ambiguous year classmates to explain in their profiles when it was they attended and which other classes they were associated with.

Thank you for your insight. I really like your website and I appreciate what you have accomplished.

Randy