HELP! Website Content & Design
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Your community needs YOU!
As you have probably noticed a little lower down the forum, there is a new topic for Website Development and sub-sections for Content and Design. We're now at the stage where we're looking for volunteers to help us in these areas.
Design
Whilst not a complete description, the design function will consider several important aspects of our website, including our front door to the world (the home page), how best to structure our sections, the FAQ & reference information, how we best provide our information to members, the linear (or otherwise) flow of visitors around our site etc. It's more of a top-level function to see how we best structure & deploy the many CMS functions of our forum software for the benefit of our existing members and to help attract & retain new members to support gaming habits, whilst making sure we provide what is wanted or needed by both.
Consideration of the design will need to take into account the overhead required to maintain the site content for the preferred design and this will form part of a decision making process when coming to design recommendations.
Parts of the design aspect will also include production of our own artwork so that we can use our own images to to customise the look & feel of our website with our own custom-graphics. So if you graphic skills then this might be an area you are keen to help out with!
Finally, the design team may also require experienced website coders if specific custom pages or elements of the website are required. If you have experience in writing websites then this might suit you!
Content
This section is a little more obvious as to what will be required. Some elements of the existing forum will need re-writing to better suit the new layout/design. Other parts of the forum might move from a stickied forum post to an article in a separate section or an FAQ. Volunteers will need to be available to help re-write these or write new content from scratch to meet the needs of the community. So if you have a flair for words and want to get involved in the new dMw website then this part of the website development might be for you.
And there's no reason you shouldn't help out in both areas if you want to do so!
The Obvious!
It should not need saying, but to avoid unintentional offence at a later date:
- the Design & Content elements will need final sign off by the Community Admins who hope to monitor & where necessary participate in the discussions in each section.
- if you volunteer to help with the website development there is no guarantee that your work will make it into the final website - there might be something better submitted or the design might change and your contribution no longer needed, but whatever happens please do not get offended in such situations.
- just like 'Vision On', your efforts will be appreciated even if we might not be able to show them all on the new website.
If you want to volunteer to help out then please post here in this thread and note if you can commit to helping with the community with either the Design aspect, the Content aspect or both.
We decided to restrict access to the new Web Development sections to those that will be helping with the workload. We did this not to hide what is being done (after all, anyone can volunteer), but to make sure that we had only stakeholders involved in the discussions who would be motivated to reach conclusions rather than becoming an enormous talking shop that would then struggle to reach conclusions.
Members of each team will be readily identified by a temporary 'forum award' so that people can see who is involved in which elements of the project.
So, if you think you can help then post in this thread please. (noting which aspect(s) you want to become involved with)
Thank you in advance for supporting our new website development!
