Buff, NY ** North Ridge Website Updates **

That is for people who are signing up with us.

 

Okay ...

I don't want to make any of you nervous with the dealine a few weeks away, and I thank you for your patience. I have never worked on more web sites in a week's time than this last week -- I did a major redesign, a dozen major and minor updates, and a new project altogether. But rest assured, if there was any doubt in my mind I couldn't pull off a decent redesign / upgrade to OUR site, I would be up front about it.

The redesign I am working on is both visual and in structure of content. I may be adding a few tricks I don't usually use as well. So laeve all that to me, but you have your own homework:

WHAT I NEED

(1) I need the official contact information for the North Ridge. This means PO Box, phone, email (can be a "@TheNorthRidge.Com" alias), etc.

(2) I don't want this half-assed (pardon my language), but if I don't at least get brief bios and pics for the officers in the next week or two, there will be no "Member Profile" page.

(3) An official list of upcoming AND RECENT events with details. I want private events listed as well, but we will leave off details of location / time and put a note "(Members Only)" after it.

(4) Particular images from E5 ... Larry will be handling this for me.

(5) A non-Halloween group pic ... Chris is working on this.


If there's anything else, I'll post it here.


MTFBWY,

Ken

 

May I ask why you need this?

The member page will be for each member, and not limited to the officers.

 

Try to think obvious ... how would I NOT need this? The whole point of a site is to have communication with people, both in passing information and networking in every sense. We need a general contact page, and I need any public information that we use. That way people can mail us, email us, or call us. Phone would be optional in our case, being a personal number, but the rest ... or don't we have a PO Box yet? If we don't have ways to easily reach us, that is a problem we need to fix as an organization.

I didn't say otherwise. But I would expect that if we want to do this, the leadership would set the example. If we don't even have the officers provide a bio, we can't expect anyone else to, and we will look pretty sad if the profile page has only two or three people on it. (That is definitley something to discuss at the general meeting.) I'm willing to do the work, even if it means profiles for 30 people. But I need bios and photos to scan or digital images (or requests to use ones I already have) ASAP.

Status Report: I've done a lot of work on the site the last couple of days, but because it's a major overhaul, the changes are not ready to go live as a whole. Because I'm doing a lot of custom navigation graphics (including Flash) instead of automatically pre-processed ones server side, I need to confirm the following overall structure. The main pages of the site:

Home
About Us ...... general info about the NR and TheForce.Net, as well as Compass House
Events ....... Calendar, with mention/link of photos of previous events in the "Archives"
Members ...... basic membership description with mention/links for joining; profiles
Join Us ...... membership requirements, policy, links to docs, interactive form
Archives ...... brief history, links to various albums (to ALL be overhauled and reorganized)
Links
Contact

The small FAQ page information is spread through the site in obvious places and seems to make more sense the way the site is being structured. For graphical and organizational reasons, I would like to keep these main pages (ones linked to from every page) to SEVEN (not counting Home). Other pages would be more in depth as necessary. If we add a special project or area such as the Jedi Academy page or section later, I could add a special logo on one or more pages separate from the usual navigation, or would just add it like any other page and restructure the Flash navigation throughout.

One more question, as I cannot make the meeting today (I'm double-booked with previous commitments as it is!) ... what, if any, information do we want on the site about parties? Will we need a separate inquiry form?

I will be available on and off by phone if you need me ... (716) 868-1329. Feel free to contact me at the meeting if you want.

Peace,

Ken

 

check out the site if you get a chance.

 

think it is looking great! i like it!

 

nice improvements cant wait to see the finished product

 

Lookin' good! Much improved. Might I suggest that we re-word the 'pet charity' bit about Compass House. Sounds like an animal rescue group. Maybe we could use 'chosen charity' or 'group charity' instead?

 

"Impressive..!Most impressive."

 

I'll start compiling the bios that I received and get them over to Ken in the next few days. That will take care of that section.

 

Status Report

(1) Organized the galleries ... I'm going to be souping up the archives page a little, but I don't think I'll be redoing the galleries much themselves apart from using the new overal graphical theme and structure.

(2) Made a number of smaller changes, based on requests from Chris and comments made here.

(3) The new navigation bar will be fully operational later today.

IMPORTANT FEEDBACK

I want to know what you think about having a starfield page with three options:

*************
(a) Watch Intro (current front splash page) -- 56kbps Connection Recommended
(b) Watch Intro w/ Sound (sountrack in background) -- Broadband recommended
(c) Skip Intro -- any speed connection
*************

Or should I leave it as it is?

BTW, anyone know our chances for taking the prize again this year? I haven't seen the other sites.

 

I say leave it as is. I really like the changes on the site so far.

One piece of criticism, on the intro "opening crawl." You have the term "fans and fanatics" on there, which is redundant since "fan" is the shortened term for "fanatic." Other than that, excellent work!

 

Ken, the website looks great! Nice job. One thing I found was a bad URL for the BPO event link...

 

Speaking for those with dial-up (at home at least), the least amount of loading that we have to do the better. I know it's a minority of us now, but we're still here

 

A bunch more changes, big and small have been made.

THis is one of the heqaviest, slowest sites I have ever made. Most pages load under 30 seconds at 56k, but not by much*. A few of the galleries would take over 3 minutes to load over a 28.8 kbps connection. Arrg. The graphics are mondo-maximized for small file size, but it's just too graphically intense.

If this is an issue for anyone, I may reorganize a few of the heavier pages into more than one page.

*IT's not that bad, really ... those are load speeds based on coming to a page cold. If you have the graphics in your browser cache from looking at another page first, that would shave 10 seconds or more off loading of all other pages.

 

Kinda cool ... type this into Google.

star wars north ridge


Oh, yeah.

 

Good work on the website. Can't wait to see more!

 

New things on the website mesa likes:

Chris has Luke looking over his shoulder...

Jay has a halo

 

Ken is looking for photos from the One Man Star Wars show 'meet n greet' we attended. If anyone has some, please send them to Ken.

 

When did he learn to throw his voice?

 

When I made the suggestion that we add photos from that event.

 

Site looks great. I love everyone's pics on the bios!

 

thought the site was an excellent improvement. it's by far more realistic in a Star Wars kind of way.

 

What are we going to do to update next year?