Site changes / additions

[CanuckDave]

ok so the site is long overdue for a big overhaul, been meaning to for a long time, and I want to get working on it now and I'd like to get some input first.
basically my plans are to give the site a better, less plain look, add content, member section where everybody can have their own profiles, along with a featured ride every month, download section for videos, tsrm in a downloadable format etc., a tech section for write ups, and generally make the interface cleaner and make it easier to access everything.

anything that you'd like to see changed or added / removed from the site? any suggestions would be appreciated.

[Deep_Blue]

Hey Dave!

This is a sweet idea!

Well, off the top of my head:

1.Being that Earl and I have both mentioned branding, one of the things that we need to do is pick our brand colours, and a brand font. These should form the core of the revised website, to maintain consistancy in our image, and these colours/font would also be used on any publicity materials that we develop (ie. business cards, the previously mentioned signs with stats to put by our cars, etc. This will help people to recognize our club simply by seeing two colours together, as opposed to having to process our whole message. Examples include: McDonalds has red and yellow, Nike has orange and white, Tommy Hilfiger has red and white, etc. I always thought that silver and black would be nice colours, but on signage,silver doesn't stand out that well. I'm also partial to red b/c of that fantastic shot we have of three generations of red supras. We can work this out later.

2. We need to make it very easy for people to understand how to sign up with the club, something like a "join the club" icon on our table of contents would be good. I said this to Earl on the very first day I joined the club, but things have been too crazy for everyone for it to actually get done.

3. Update the links page with some of the ones we've dug up (More on the way, just have to get around to it)

4.Overhaul the FAQ page so that it's more useful.

5. I'd almost say scrap the download section and put a video gallery section into the forums.

6. I honestly don't even know what to make of the Reviews section :dunno:

7. This is nitpicky, but I don't like where the search function is right now. It just doesn't feel right on the main table of contents

8. We need to find a way to encourage people to make articles, but I don't know if anyone has the time. This might be better served in the forums (Scratch the submit news and topics buttons in the table of contents)

9. Hit the site with a little bit of Java to jazz things up.

10. I know that you work very hard to maintain this site as it is Dave, but what we need is a way of updating it easy and fast, so that we can get events we're having on the news section not just one day before they happen. I don't think I've mentioned this before, but my mom owns a Web design firm. I think that they have some proprietary stuff that can do this for us (super easy updates). I'll talk to her and see if I can get my hands on it.

That's all I have for now, but I'll sleep on it.

Cheers,

Tim

[CanuckDave]

excellent, thanks for the ideas Tim.

the way the site is set up now, I just wanted to get something up quickly, so I used a basic CMS (content management system) which made it pretty easy to get up, but has a lot of limitations so I just worked with what was there. thus the FAQ section, downloads, reviews, gallery, articles etc. looking very half assed and confusing / useless..

having very prominent club sign up info and a way to sign up quickly is one of my top priorities, it has to be as easy as possible, or a lot of people won't be interested in going to the trouble.

having "club colours" certainly makes sense, to give people something to recognize us by. don't really have any reason for making the logo red, I just did and then having red cars of all supra generations in the club just so happened to work out..

as far as content goes, I kinda dislike using java as it depends on users browser supporting it, I much prefer server side scripting like php so the site will display the same way for everybody, which I think is fairly important, having portions of a site which don't work properly for some people just doesn't give a great impression.

as it is right now its easy enough to change whats posted on the front page, that depends more on people actually posting up events in advance. in the coming year, we'll have to make sure to plan for events farther in advance, and post monthly club meets, dyno days etc well in advance so nobody will miss it.

basically my list of pages / areas of the site to work on and creat is:

* Main page - first item on page would be sign up / general club info and would always remain at as the first item so all new members see it. after that, event listings and other news would be listed

* FAQ / tech articles - an area where there will be all the information needed by newbies and the more experienced alike, with tech guides / walk throughs, general specs, etc. celicasupra.com has a very nice FAQ section, and I intend to make up something like that but with info for all generations of supras

* Club Members - a listing of all members, with whatever info each wants to put up (i.e. specs, plans) and photos for each.

* Forums - basically unchanged, but I'll make a theme up to match the rest of the site

* Links - self explanatory..

* Gallery / downloads. for each of these, if I can figure out a stable and easy to use system, I'll get it working, but if not I'll leave them off for now, and we can continue to use the forum for such things. still need to get an auto-resize feature for the forum though, will make putting up images a lot easier.

If you get information about the software from the web design company, do send it along, I'll take a look at it.

for now though, I'm planning to keep the site running on open source software, since it doesn't cost me or the club anything, and for things like the forum and member base they are all kept in databases so its not hard to transfer to different systems if theres ever a need.

[celica83_gts]

Just an opinion- I hate sites that load slowly! Not everyone has the same hardware or software at home, as Dave touched on already. I like most of the ideas presented so far, but huge graphics, flash, java, etc. just bog things down. Keep it clean and simple while concentrating on the content.

Bob

[Deep_Blue]

No problem,

I was more or less being flippant when I said we should throw java on our site. :lol:

Cheers,

Tim

[CanuckDave]

yeah I'll certainly keep that in mind when I redo the site. not everybody has fast connections, and I want to make it accessable for everybody.

[1jzsupra]

i like how the new zealand supra club site looks

[James Earl]

I think that we don't want to be about tricks...more content would be best.

We need people to post up their work done as they do it. I know some people did some lighting upgrades..I hope the final write up makes it to this site.

We do not have enough active members to make the forum a place to people would check into reularly but if we can add enough "how to's" etc we can eventually get it some regular traffic.

URL

[dogstar]

java is gay, plus, it seems to me that a lot of people disable it.

flash is alright, slow to load though.

i think that minor mods would be best at the start, possibly a different background color, i find the white to be a bit too much at times.

a font, logo, and club colors would be great too.