[Gloucs] Draft new GLUG website

[Andrew Oakley]

Barbie wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 03, 2007 at 10:47:36PM +0100, Glyn Davies wrote:
> > Andrew Oakley wrote:
> > >Here's my attempt: http://aoakley.com/glug-draft/
> > Looks good.
> > Barbie, are you happy to release your beta to the masses? We can 
> The link is http://glug.grango.org/

Cool. I'm happy with any design and any content management system (or lack
thereof).

My main concern is that we, as a group, simply don't update our website. I
don't think it's a question of whether it is easy or difficult to update, or
whether we have a great CMS or just use HTML+SCP/FTP. I think it is more the
case that we're all busy professionals with equally busy home lives, and
none of us ever get around to it.

Therefore my recommendation is that the site should still look fresh and
relevent, *even* if no human has updated it in a while. In particular:

* Since our meetings are always the 3rd Tuesday of the month, and we've
consistently kept this for a couple of years now, the site should
automatically populate the next predicted meeting date, whilst advising
people to check on the mailing list to confirm. It shouldn't require anyone
to manually put the next dates in, not even if we do it 6 months in advance.
Accept that we ARE that lazy and let the computer do the work!

* Equally, our venue hasn't changed often in a couple of years, and MLabs
continue to be happy for us to provide free training to their staff which
would otherwise cost them thousands, er... I mean happy for us to carry on
meeting there. So the site should mention our normal venue and provide
details of busses, facilities, address, postcode and link to a map, again
whilst advising people to check on the mailing list to confirm.

* Archives of lecture notes go stale quickly; people rarely upload them
anywhere other than to their own separate website, or as an attachment to
the mailing list. We'll end up with a load of lecture notes from two years
ago and then... nothing, again, which will look stale, again. I'd get rid of
_hosting_ of lecture notes completely, and instead...

* The only manually-updatable content I'd really like to see would be a
links page, with categories which can also be updated. So you could have a
category such as "Lecture notes" which could link to presentations hosted
elsewhere, plus other categories such as our favourite tech sites.

* RSS feeds I'm rather ambivolent about. Unless you choose carefully, and
stick to major sites, they tend to stall and make the site look stale. If we
stick to the Slashdots and Ars Technicas of the web, fine, but if it's a
bunch of eclectic occasional feeds that stall two months before anyone
notices, they can make a site look worse than if they weren't there at all.
Worse yet are feeds that get off-topic dilution, such as personal feeds
which are usually techie, but occasionally family/friends blogs. It's just a
case of picking the feeds wisely.

* Basically I think we should accept that our strengths are in our mailing
list and our meetings, and not try to pretend we can provide regular fresh
new content to a website every week- because we won't; it'll go stale again.
Our website should be minimalistic and play up to our strengths; the mailing
list and the meetings.

* "Just because we _can_ do it doesn't mean we _should_" ;-)

Curses, that was a lot more words than I intended.

-- 
Andrew Oakley



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