How to Help

A Beginner's Guide to Structural Engineering is very much still under development and will be for several years.  The goal is to have a free, on-line resource for the concepts that every entry level structural engineer needs to know.  This effort takes a lot of time and ideas.  In order keep this site progressing into a useful resource for students and practitioners we need both feedback and funding.  Here is how you can help:

Feedback

There are a couple of ways that you can make this a better resource through your feedback:

1. Use the feedback links.  When you find an error of any type, let me know!  The bottom of each chapter index has a link to send me an email.  The message line will tell me what part of the site you are emailing from, but a good description of the problem helps a lot!
2. Editorial Board.  I would like to put together an editorial board that would meet via teleconference once a year to review suggestions submitted by others and to suggest direction for the various parts of the site.  I am thinking of restricting this board to two groups of people:
   • academics that either adopt parts of the site for their class text or at least encourage their student to use the site as a resource, and
   • sponsors/advertisers who have a stake in getting their message out via the web site. 

   Academic members of the board can influence the content of the system so that it better fits their classroom instruction needs.  They can also suggest ways to make it easier to organize the material for more efficient use.

   Industry members of the board can provide both content advice as well as presentation advise.  We want this site to be as appealing as possible so that it is used often.

Contact me if you are interested in being a part of this effort.

Funding

There are several reasons why someone would want to sponsor this site.  Here are two:

• A Beginner's Guide to Structural Engineering reaches a world wide engineering audience.  It is a focused group of structural engineers, both student and professional.  We regularly get hits from all over the world... and the site isn't even advertised yet!  Contact me to find out the latest in site usage statistics.
• You will be taking a big step forward in supporting an innovative structural engineering educational tool.  For one, all those students out there will appreciate either not having to buy an expensive textbook or having an additional resource to help them study.  Other engineers will appreciate having this information at their finger tips.

So far, this effort has been a one man show and has taken considerable time to bring to this point.  Almost all that time has been unfunded.  I can only work for free for limited amounts of time.  Funding will help me to free up more time to focus on this as well as to hire competent help to assist with the development of the content as well as to bring the web programming to another level.  There are also equipment and other needs that, when met, will make this a much more stable site. 

Make a Donation

We are happy to accept donations to help keep this site on-line!  If you are using any of the texts as a primary text, we suggest a $50.00 US donation (about a third of what a regular textbook costs!).  Otherwise, feel free to donate whatever you feel the information is worth!