[Actionchix] State of the new website

[Akkana Peck]

Mary Gardiner writes:
> On Sat, Jun 24, 2006, chris wrote:
> > http://mosshead.com/projects/linuxchix/files/linuxchixIA-2.pdf is the
> > information architecture work that I submitted in May. 
> 
> Ok, I'll have a look and let you know by Wednesday if I have any
> particular thoughts. Other people: please comment if you read it, even

Looks good. Definitely clearer than the current organization (which I
find somewhat confusing). One question: I'm not sure what "Women
Developing Open Source" and "For Employers" are in Resources (if
they're on the current site, I can't find them) but I wondered if
they might belong better in "The Chix". Depends on what they are;
they might be in the right place already. Everything else looks
fine, nice and clear.

> > 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.

Certainly we shouldn't throw away that old content ... except for
obsolete pages like Meet the Chix and Goodies. Or is Goodies
obsolete? If the mugs are still a going concern, maybe that could be
combined with the Donations page. BTW, I never found the word
"Goodies" very clear; I tend to click on it thinking that it will
be especially good links to click on.

> > Amy and I put a lot of energy/time into wrapping our heads around the
> > architecture, page layout and design of the Linuxchix site, however we
> > never did receive any feedback. If everybody really hates it we'd like
> > to know. 

Looking at the "Redesign Comps" PDFs again, I find myself wondering:
why does it have both a left and a right sidebar, with the left
sidebar doing nothing except showing the penguin? Why not put the
navigation in the left sidebar under the penguin, as is pretty much
the standard on the web?  Right now all that white space under the
penguin is wasted, when it could be doing something useful. 

And having the extra sidebar is going to cause problems for those of
us who have small screens or prefer not to maximize our browser
windows: either the content area of the page gets really small, or
else you set a minimum page width which means that small-screen
people (a) can't read the content without scrolling left and right
and/or (b) won't see any navigation links (because they're invisible
off the right side of the page).

Most sites I see that use right sidebars put ads in them, which
isn't too bad since it means I don't see the ads (unless they make
the page width such that I can't read all the content either, which
is happening more and more often.  But putting the important nav
links on the right seems really unusual and makes the site more
difficult to use.

I'm not sure what the Subscribe! button under the penguin is for.
If I clicked on it, what would it do?

-- 
	...Akkana
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