Goals for redesign.

[DavidMann10k]

A list from Marty:

• improved homepage design / layout with:
  • main info about both meetings above the fold
  • contact info easily accessible
  • new menu that includes a link to blog posts
  • no blog posts themselves on the homepage
• redesigned wordpress theme
  • cleaner look, incorporating the new IGDA logo
  • possibly (hopefully) based on, or even using, one of the official wordpress themes (stylesheet changes can go a long way!)
• re-thought-out information architecture
  • ideally all existing pages considered (some of them might not be necessary)
  • re-designed nav to make everything accessible, but maybe not at the top level
  • categories of blog posts considered too, we need to decide if we want to jettison (ie, delete) blog posts that were just links to eventbrite (see next topic)
• expanded/updated history page
  • ideally this would replace the blog posts we have now for each meeting (at least some meetings are missing because this was never consistent)
  • we will need to pull content from either (both) blog posts or eventbrite posts
  • ideally summaries of each meeting, but maybe just dates with expand/collapse for full info(?)
• navigation that includes a link to every page

[mgrider]

We actually knocked some of this off already. The important points of the first bullet point are "done" (on the old WP site).

All the stuff about WP no longer applies if we are moving to Jekyll. The benefits of Jekyll (and github) are as follows:

• we can ditch our existing webhost, saving ~$100 / year. (We'd still be paying for the domain, so it would need to get transferred. Our current hosting is more like $120/yr.)
• more easily editable by the community "Just make a pull request!"

Are there others?

[DavidMann10k]

Ahh, ok. Thanks for clarifying that.

So aside from avoiding some unnecessary hosting costs, github pages run really fast because they're static. I noticed as I have been looking at the existing site and clicking though it that it hangs a lot.

Potentially anyone with a github account could write a meeting summary on github in markdown and submit a PR, which is pretty cool.

Getting off WP is an advatage in itself, IMO. We will just have more control over things like Open Graph and what's running on our site.

[mgrider]

Any of these goals that are still things we want to do should be opened as their own issue, IMO.