Changes in the Web Site

Paul Franklin has been leading a small working party to look at the mcc web site and bring it up to date and improve its appearance. Since it was first designed by Andrew Findlay over five years ago it has grown rapidly and diversely – like Topsy, somewhat – and has become a bit shapeless. (Someone said “Spaghetti is an understated metaphor”). Three strands have emerged:

The overall ‘look and feel’ is a bit dated and other camera club sites have more impact (the good ones, that is – some are dismal!) Glynn Grylls and George Blair have been most concerned with this so far, and new designs for at least the high level “impact” pages will emerge. These front pages are interesting for members as we like to look good, but really important for visitors, to catch their interest and get them to explore the site.

Secondly, the present web site is based on a twiki platform which allows all members to contribute and edit text and images in most areas of the site. More than one-third of the members made significant contributions last year, with a total of well over 2,000 ‘actions’ in all. That’s great and is what was intended, but twiki, which used to be ‘open source’ went a bit commercial last year. Fortunately there is a daughter-of-twicki called foswiki which is genuinely open source and has a number of better features, so we need to migrate. This is not straightforward, but Andrew in on the case and the prototypes coming out are encouraging, In particular, the galleries are much improved.

The third strand is to deal with the spaghetti / Singapore Noodles in the structure. The site grew ‘on demand’ as people had bright ideas and inserted pages and trees of pages in ad hoc ways. This need cleaning up and simplifying, and in places needs bits to be written to point out what a section is for, and how to navigate it. This should make the whole site friendlier and easy to use, especially for new members.

This restructuring can be done in two stages – quite a lot before the migration to foswiki, and then a final tidy-up when we have the new platform running and new front pages in place. The first results should be seen in making the Members’ Area less cluttered and easier to follow. Development, Competition Images and Exhibitions have been done. Any comments to John Ashford, please, but do remember the bit about “Young folk & rich folk shouldn’t see work half done!”

jha

-- JohnAshford - 29 Sep 2009