I wanted to bring this up. We’ve gotten a lot of great stuff in our new project site, but many here can agree that it’s very similar to the old project site still. Some have suggested the idea of a total visual / copy-editing revamp for the long term. The foundation for our project site is already in place and is solid, so building on top of it in the long term shouldn’t be a problem.
So, questions:
What kind of ways do we want to expand our copyediting?
What visual / UX improvements could the user-facing end of the project site make use of?
What kind of jQuery plugins might be useful for improving page presentation?
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While it may be a bit over-the-top for what we want to do, I think there are more than a few visual elements that are really effective here. (parallax scrolling for different subpages representing different ideas, for example.)
I agree. I made as few changes to the old site as possible because I was only making pages to last a few weeks. I didn’t expect anything that I did to make it into the new site! I don’t mind that I did, but I didn’t put any thought into a future design when I updated it.
It would be good to think about a new design. One thing is to get as little text as possible on the landing page - just a good graphic presentation and a few key words/phrases with links to information on other pages.
When you say ‘expand our copy-editing’, do you mean ‘expand our copy’? Or are you talking about editing what text we have in a different way?
Yeah, I meant expand our copy, although I’m certainly not against cutting up parts of the text to visually represent in a different manner. (turning some pieces into headings, others into explanations, for example)
I do agree that it might be good to think about a way to have less text and more visuals on the landing point.
Some things to consider. Keep in mind that the current site does a pretty good job with a lot of this, but we can certainly improve things:
What does Diaspora look like?
What kind of cool things can you do with it?
What cool people are actively using it? (Maybe we could showcase several highly active users of different pods with their permission? Maybe even Diaspora-centric social media pages?)
Why are centralized services such a problem?
Why should Joe Average care, and how can he get involved?
I think in the long term it would be good to start from first principles and build a site from the ground up (in terms of design concept and text) - hopefully though we can use the technical design that Dennis has done for us.
Some good points to consider in your list. I’ll mull them over in my mind for the next few days.
Having a good website is very important, but the current one is pretty good. I think we should polish it instead of starting from scratch once again, we clearly have more important things to do.
I’m happy to if I can. I don’t really understand the .erb stuff but I’ve found the file containing all the text, so I’ll have a go.
But we haven’t had a proper vote to confirm the move to diaspora* (all lower case), have we? As it’s a change of branding policy, we really should properly ratify this before making changes.
If this has already happened, please point me in the direction of the discussion/vote so that I know. Thanks.
The discussion is in branding, we did not official vote, but everyone seems agree on this…
Btw, the text can be changed easily, I was talking about the image (I read you have a lowercase version…, or what about simply use this one but in white:)
