[Actionchix] State of the new website

[jennyw]

Akkana Peck wrote:
> Mary Gardiner writes:
>   
>> On Sat, Jun 24, 2006, chris wrote:
>>     
>>> The old site with it's current inconsistent architecture is more work to
>>> develop than the new site will be with a consistent architecture. So,
>>> it's not even very rewarding to do twice the work on the old site when
>>> we could just build the new site once and be done with it ... and have
>>> something that looks decent too.
>>>       
>> I'm concerned about throwing the content of the old one away though. For
>> example, a lot of work has gone into things like the book reviews, and
>> I think people would be upset if it vanishes without at least some
>> restoration plan. 
>>     
>
> I'm sure we could get volunteers to help with migrating content of
> pages like the book reviews and courses from the old structure to
> the new, once the migration gets to a point where we have templates
> ready. Don't feel like the people doing the site design necessarily
> need to be the ones migrating all the content too.

Chris is referring to the structure (HTML), not the content (writing).
We tried to convert the code into good XHTML and it was a difficult and
messy process. We could get it into XHTML no problem; getting it to make
sense from a structural standpoint, though ... after tweaking it a
number of times it looks to be a lot easier to just convert to plain
text and redo all of the HTML. For example, sometimes tables are used
where we should use unordered lists; sometimes definition lists are used
properly but other times they aren't.

And I agree with Akkana ... the people doing the design shouldn't be the
only ones involved in converting content.  As we develop the templates,
we should also consider whether or not to use Plone content types, which
could enforce consistent structure. For example, Meet the Chix right now
has inconsistent fields from one to the other, although there are a lot
of similarities.  Do we want that? Or do we want a certain set of
mandatory fields?

About Chris and Amy's docs ... The IA doc looks like a great start to
me. I think I'd suggest having the RSS aggregator (Planet) appear more
prominently than under the chix. Maybe having it's own tab Likewise, it
would be great to have live.linuxchix.org use the same look. I'd like to
see it stay at live.linuxchix.org, though, as opposed to being under
www. If that's too many tabs, I think it would be okay to have chapters
and mailing lists under a section called "Join", since that's what
people will probably be interested in doing by going to either.  I'd
also suggest that mailing list archives appear as links with the list
descriptions, instead of having an archives section. 

The design looks great! Chris and Amy have done a great job! I do have
some suggestions, though. Like Akkana, I'd rather there wasn't so much
white space on the left. I'd suggest maybe even trying to move the logo
to the right side, keeping as much content on the left side of the page
as possible (the logo is great, but if you have a small screen, as
Akkana said, you'd probably prefer to have content show up in the
sections the portion that's most visible).

Jen