Hi,
I hope people don't feel I'm hijacking this mailing list (I'm not a developer). I wanted to participate in the website redesign discussion. I'm not officially involved, although I'm hoping to be! (I've submitted a mockup proposal - duckgoesoink.deviantart.com, and would love to be further involved.)
My comments concerning Steven's structure proposal:
I think the user groups you've defined are good (it's so important to define the target audience, so as to avoid aiming for the wrong crowd - design-wise, content-wise, etc). And the focus on activities could make navigation simpler, especially as the user groups will probably see some overlap. I generally like the proposed menu structure.
However I'm a bit anti-wiki - in my experience if they're not wikipedia.org they're usually too chaotic for normal people to make any sense of, they're randomly updated, have very inconsistent writing styles, have many unfinished pages, and information can get scattered/duplicated. Looking at the current wiki, there is a lot of general information, much of which would be useful to have on the main website if tidied up (I assume the website would be updated regularly by people assigned to keep info up to date).
Anywho, just my two cents.
Cheers, Hinerangi Courtenay (duckgoesoink)
On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 7:55 PM, Ian Caldwell <inchosting@...400...> wrote: personally I have a beef with the wiki, I see no real reason to keep the wiki.... In my opinion it serves no purpose if our docs are good enough, and kept in SVN they can be updated easy enough by the people that need to.... It's crazy. Thanks, Ian Caldwell
On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 7:51 PM, Ian Caldwell <inchosting@...400...> wrote: hello, This email is sent on behalf of Steven M. Ottens.
So I think we shouldn't try to get the wiki into Django. The wiki is the wiki and people are reasonably aware of the principle of a wiki. That being said, currently the wiki is a whole separate entity which I never ventured into until today. There is a wealth of information there, but it is hidden behind the simple link 'wiki'
So I don't think we should try to create a design which forces the wiki to behave as the rest of the site, but to create a separate (but similar) design for the wiki to make it clear for the users they are in the wiki with a clear way back to the site. Also we should make more appropriate links from the site to the wiki. There are many topics in the site which are also discussed in the wiki, we should link to those. I came up in my restructuring mail with 'landing pages' on various topics. Having various main pages in the wiki which reflect the menu-structure in the website might create a stronger bridge between the two, without restricting the wiki to the website-structure.
Regards Steven
note: I know making a difference between the wiki and 'the website' isn't entirely fair, the wiki is part of the website etc etc. It is just a quick way to get the message across (I hope)