Site Redesign and Goals for the Future

[dawn_felagund]

Hi, everyone,

My comods and I have been talking for some time now about some big plans for the group. I hope that we can start working on them this summer, and we would greatly appreciate any input from our members that they care to give! :)

First and foremost, we hope to redesign the site this summer. Our current design, while functional, represents my very first foray into the wild and woolly world of CSS layouts. I can do much better these days. Besides, the current design is getting rather old and tired. By the time I cleaned up the current code, I might as well make a new design.

Before I explain in greater detail what our plans for the redesign are, I want to make a few points clear:

• Whatever redesign we undertake will continue to be motivated by the goals I had when making our current design: accessibility and ease-of-use for as many users as possible. That means that we will continue to keep graphics to a minimum, and all design will be done only with W3C-compliant XHTML and CSS. So no worries that you'll be waiting half of forever for multiple large images to download or that your browser will crash because of the weird scripts we're using. We will always choose functionality over flashiness.


• The current layout will continue to be available on the archive portion of the site for members who wish to use it.


• The redesign will not affect how the archive functions in any way. This is strictly an aesthetic undertaking.

We are hoping to redesign the site in conjunction with a new section to the site: a gallery for members to share and comment on Silmarillion-related artwork. We've always tried to welcome artists to our group, but they have been left in the cold much of the time, without a place to share their work on our website aside from participating in special projects. We hope that a gallery will begin to remedy this.

As part of the opening of the gallery, we will be featuring an Artist of the Quarter. The Artist of the Quarter will have their work featured as part of the banner on our website, where currently we have the group logo. This will be the single graphic on our main pages.

As my comods and I begin knuckling in for some serious discussion and planning for the redesign, we want very much to hear what you all want to see on the new site design. After all, you all are the ones who use the site regularly to post your work and enjoy the work of others. We want the site to be something most everyone finds easy and pleasant to use.

If there is anything about the appearance or organization of the current site that you love, please do share it, so that we know to keep it! If there is anything that you dislike or find difficult to use, we also want to hear from you. If you have preferences or peeves in general where websites are concerned, feel free to share them. Whether you visit the site once a month, once a year, or every day, we want to hear from you! We are a small community, so even a single voice has the power to sway the decisions we make.

Please comment here with feedback or suggestions or email us at moderator@silmarillionwritersguild.org.

Thank you and best regards,

Dawn

Comments

[heartofoshun.livejournal.com]

I think I am the oldest person active in the SWG, but there are others of my generation! And I know others still with worse eyes that me! Computers are not good for one's eyesight either! Life's a drag sometimes.

[dawn_felagund]

I don't think it was an age thing so much as a "I don't like it now when she's asking for feedback so I'll wait till it's permanent and then bitch and complain" thing. ;) Human nature! No one complained about the font, which would have been fixable in a few keystrokes, but I did get a complaint about the color scheme after the fact. Too bad. That's why I'm very heartened that people are asking what they want now rather than waiting till the new design is finished! :)

[heartofoshun.livejournal.com]

My daughter tells me that I am a cranky old lady and that this persona is very new for me and really annoying and she generalizes that she finds a lot of people my age that she has to deal with professionally are just like me!! I do know my eyes are significantly worse than they were five years ago. And if anything I am harder on them in the way I use them.

Complaining after the fact is a drag. I just remember relaing to the font enlarger button that it worked for me for ages and then it didn't. Then I wondered after a couple of tries to fix it, if people really liked it so small and I was the only one who needed large print!

[dawn_felagund]

I am blessed with extraordinarily good eyesight. I'm sure more people are with your font preferences than mine! :)

Complaining after the fact is one of my few peeves as a mod, I have to admit, at least when I go to any effort to solicit feedback before the fact and I get crickets in reply. The text adjustor problem certainly wasn't complaining after the fact; the only thing I can figure happened is that we updated the software and some change threw a wobbly with your browser. Or maybe an update in your browser threw a wobbly with the text-adjustor code.

I am not at all familiar with the AOL browser. Does it have View --> Zoom? (That's how to force a font increase in Firefox and, I think, IE as well.)

[heartofoshun.livejournal.com]

The problem with AOL is that is does not have its own enlarger. One has to be able to read a website or use that site's enlarger button. My computer is already set to large. If I go any bigger on my computer settings, then I start running text ontop of graphics and it is absolutely impossible to read.