Towards a New CCANZ Website
Matt McGregor
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The existing CCANZ was built in June 2012. Since then, we've tweaked the site on a number of occasions as the priorities of the project have changed. This has, predictably enough, left us with a Franken-site, one that does not work well on phones, and one that also lacks a consistent design.
William Mckee Tue 1 Dec 2015 10:48PM
Have it publicly hosted on Github, so people can easily develop it.
Move away from wordpress and php. Python has some excellent frameworks for web - Django, Flask etc and a static site would also work. Bootstrap is an option for mobile first.
Matt McGregor Wed 2 Dec 2015 11:49PM
Thanks @williammckee.
Quick question: we have an archive of a few hundred pages and posts that have been published in wordpress. Would it be prohibitively expensive to import these into a new, non WP website? We can't afford to spend big (or even medium, really) money, so it would be good to know if we are bound to WP.
William Mckee Thu 3 Dec 2015 12:29AM
@mattmcgregor Wordpress archive would be no problem to take into another framework. If Nikola is used they have a import_wordpress command that imports the wordpress xml archive. I've used this myself for taking wordpress posts into a static site. I haven't used it for wordpress pages but I think it will be the same as dealing with posts.
Wordpress has a strange proprietary markdown format but it's totally doable.
I am going to DevMob (http://devmob.co.nz/) this weekend so will ask around there if anyone has any advice/ideas. I know there are other ccanz volunteers going to be there so might be able to turn it into a session and get something happening.
Matt McGregor Thu 3 Dec 2015 1:10AM
Awesome, thanks. We've been doing a brainstorm about what we'd like the new website to be, so I'll share that shortly, and folks can toss in their ideas.
Matt McGregor Thu 3 Dec 2015 2:56AM
Rough summary of the conversation Elizabeth, myself and our intern Alec had on Wednesday. Keen to see what others think.
Working:
* basic hierarchy of information on the site (i.e. licences --> specific areas --> calls to action / comms --> news / events / commentary)
* menu bar good
* licence and project explanations in good, plain English
* hierarchy of information on the project pages also good
Not sure about:
* where to put comms / community info (newsletter sign-up, call for volunteers, etc)
* how many additional fields to put under the 'projects' bit (i.e. specific links for journalists, writers, musicians, copyright reform, etc) without giving people too many options and without the site seeming like a sea of icons.
* whether to fold NZCommons back into a new and improvedCCANZ site.
Not working:
* no coherent design
* too black and white and grey
* FAQs are poorly formatted and hidden
* 'Projects' terminology is off-putting
* Resources page needs a hierarchy, though having a repository is useful, so the page itself should stay.
William Mckee Fri 4 Dec 2015 12:31AM
@mattmcgregor That's a great list. Are you able to export off the xml archive of cc and nzcommons sites? I asked once before in a email but didn't get anything back (I understand you are very busy). At least with this xml export I can begin having a play with ideas, and see how messy the export is.
I have been creating svg logos from some the existing artwork on the site (glam/data/education etc). If that sort of helps answer @waynemackintosh question of visual design time. Will be great to get others to help on this. I will get these uploaded.
Replace all png/jpg on the site with svg files.
Matt McGregor Fri 4 Dec 2015 12:36AM
Sorry William - that's super-easy to do. Will email something to you now.
In terms of design, I think the feedback we get is: a) more colour (perhaps closer to the NZCommons site) and b) consistent use of logos for various project areas across all resources.
Matt McGregor Fri 4 Dec 2015 12:39AM
An additional point: the general state of many international CC sites is mixed, with many being wordpress sites based on an old version of the CC International site. If we do this properly, it could potentially be of use to dozens of other projects.
William Mckee Sat 5 Dec 2015 3:31AM
I've processed the nzcommons site export that Matt sent me and it is live here: http://wcmckee.com/nzcommons/
The source for the site is https://github.com/wcmckee/nzcommons-static
Will work on ccanz site export. I got an error when I tried the first time :(
Wayne Mackintosh · Tue 1 Dec 2015 10:44PM
I would agree that the CCANZ Website would benefit from a "mobile first" design approach and refresh of the navigation structure taking into account how focus projects have matured since 2012. As a side question - do we have anyone from the community who is able to donate some visual design time for a new site?