Website redesign

Information on this page is Obsolete; it is preserved for historical interest

Time to update hacdc.org!

Here we'll track progress and ideas for the hacdc.org redesign!

Info Architecture / Design Priorities

Top Level Nav

• Wiki
• Mailing List
• Calendar
• Membership
• Donate
• Visit Us

Priorities

• Promote donation/membership
• Getting people to space/events
• Public awareness of activities

Secondary Priorities

• Disseminate knowledge, information, resources
• Encourage collaboration at HacDC and in community

Information to publish

Static Information

• Logistics / Contact
  • E-contact info (Facebook, Twitter, G-phone, IRC, Mailing lists)
  • Directions/Address (Picture of door/church, google map, mass transit and driving info, phone number to call, doorman (when working again))

• Membership Page
  • Donation link
  • Information on joining, benefits, membership experience/opportunities

• Donate page

Dynamic Information

• Fund raising campaigns
  • Specific funds for equipment, events, projects, expenses

• Event listings
  • Ongoing Running Events (Workshops, Classes, Theme nights, Member meetings)
  • One Time Events (Talks, Parties, Special Meetings and Get-togethers)

• Blog
  • Event coverage (photos/writeups of events)
  • Project coverage (how-to, photos/writeup)
  • Space promotion/PR (coverage of good things, thanks, congrats, bragging)

• Videos
  • Videos taken on an ongoing basis
  • Event videos

• Project pages
  • Complete details of projects on wiki
  • Link to project from blog post on main site
  • Possible pages on main site for project (how to avoid going stale like in past!?)

• Wishlist
  • Member profiles ("picture", name, interests and areas of expertise, projects, how to contact)
  • Ping authors of nodes that haven't been updated (projects, etc)

Integration and Single Sign-on

• Use open-ID as a short term SSO solution
• Look to LDAP as a long term ideal solution for web+system account management of user groups, permissions
• Anyone can write an app in any platform if they implement Open-ID

How to extend website for sub groups

• Groups may need their own sub-site functions. (How to do this. Maybe a drupal page like for projects? also how not to let this go stale?)

Brainstorming/Ideas (from long ago)

My list of potential improvements (that I can recall off the top of my head) is something like:

• Reduce white space
• Use more media (Flickr pool, podcasts, videos of events, images in general)
• Emphasize donation and membership (age old nonprofit trick)
• Make it fast and easy to find out what the hottest goings-ons are in terms of projects, events
• Better calendar
• Use the Civicrm stuff ben installed to do event management eventbrite style
• Allow people to hook up circuits to the site somehow (TFine mentioned an idea that sounded like a circuit gallery)
• I thought it would be cool to build some kind of basic AI into the site to determine colors, content organization, etc. Will think more about this.

Discussion with Ben Stanfield on 12/8

• Featured events and projects
• Flickr feed
• Podcast
• Membership/Donate
• doorman
• we'll look at drupal themes and consider purchasing one from topnotchthemes if we find one worthwhile, otherwise we'll find a decent free theme and customize it
• potentially use panels (ajax tabs) for a media section on homepage?
• maybe have a "terminal mode" that uses DrupalShell (as presented at last lightning talks) for a command line mode for geeky fun

Obscurite's other random ideas: - have our IRC bot be able to twitter URLs it detects from IRC and then have the website suck those up into a "what people are discussing" block on the site. Would need a way to filter/remove undesirable content (maybe moderated?)

Drupal Themes

Orange:

• nice multicolumn layout with media area?
• http://drupal.org/project/orange

Fields:

• nice multi-column with wide graphic
• http://drupal.org/project/fields_2009

Elements:

• nice elegant layout
• http://drupal.org/project/elements_theme

Inspiration from other sites

• AlphaOneLabs.com
  • Great slider with images from recent events
  • Great contact information (twitter, etc)

• Pink Line Project: A local, Drupal-powered arts news site