Website watercooler

[Johnnie Moore]

I thought I'd start this as a place to kick around how the site's working. I was prompted by a message from Sven who thinks some sections of the old site should be kept.

He particularly mentioned the pages for the conferences, which might be better for selling events to non-members. He also likes the old bio pages.

For myself, I think this is the right place for people to maintain the bios, especially as everyone just manages their own. (On the old site, Leif or I would have to do all the maintenance).

I do think we might need to have some pages to promote conferences. Don't know if they can be replicted here or not. Maybe we also need to think about how we organise the home page for the new site. My hunch is it's great for those already in the network, but maybe not quite suited to casual visitors...

Thoughts? Questions? Sarcastic remarks?

[Leif Hansen]

Hey, anyone out there good with graphics who wants to create a more AIN-ish top of page banner than the generic (but pretty) green trees template we've been using?

I think a collage of improv scenes would be cool, or ?

Thanks, and submit your ideas or actual images to leif at sparknw.com
-Leif

[Jodi Cohen]

it's daunting for me, as a not so savvy computer user. lots of info and graphics, which are great. but it's dense. if i hadn't been at the conference in november and seen the rollout, i don't know if i'd be even more overwhelmed than ever. still figuring out how it works and where to check in. lots to look at and while i'm sure it's allllllllll fascinating and scintillating, i try to think about and navigate to what i want and what i'm most interested in. there are good problems to have though, i think. thank you for all of your work, past, present and future, on the site. jodi

[Leif Hansen]

Okay guys, I need your feedback. I've figured out how to create a new tab and a more simple page. You'll see a new "Conferences" tab at the top of our pages, which takes you to:
http://appliedimprov.ning.com/conferences
And any pages we've created. As a demo, I took the Trondheim info I could find and put it there.
So, for a more simple/professional look (still shows 'latest activity' on right though, I'll work on that) we can just give folks the above link. What do you think?
-Leif

[Sven Veine]

Good work, Leif! I think this is a big step in the right direction at least for us working with the conferences. Probably a good point that Daniel makes that this page should not allow comments(?). I'm sorry to keep you working, but if you let me, I would suggest a similar simple page to "main" tab or a new "AIN presentation" tab with a simple and businesslike introduction of the network to the people out there in cyberspace. I still think there is space for some improvement here. Again, thanks for all the effort you put into this, Leif!

[Leif Hansen]

Okay, comments are now off (:
As for your second suggestion, I think I hear you suggesting either a short introduction to AIN in the beginning of this conference page, or an additional 'About AIN' (?) type tab that has AIN basics. I can do that, but need somebody else to come up with the actual text that should go there (in either case). Who is good at 'official' stuff? (:
-Leif

[Sven Veine]

Very good! Yes, an additional "About AIN" type tab is my suggestion. Johnnie is a very official guy. :-) Just another question about the content of the conference tab. Is it very confusing when the headline says: AIN-Europe AIN Conference: Trondheim, Norway, June 5-8th, 2008, but the actual conference are June 6-8th, with the pre-conference day June 5th? The hole concept with the pre-conference thing is not usual in Norway, so I just have to ask about this. Thanks, Leif!

[Daniel Knutson-Bradac]

Hey Leif, I noticed that the Trondheim page allowed comments so I inserted some and got the message "undefined comment" , did a few more with the same result. Then I refreshed the page and the comments appeared with my pic. I just went back and erased them so as to not deface such a lovely page, but others may not and you do not seem to have a static environment in this attempt anyway.

[Caitlin McClure]

Hi all,

I tried to jump into this discussion yesterday but my response landed at the end of the discussion rather than here. Hmmmm. Still getting my sea legs.

So it sounds like it's possible to have a page (pages?) set aside within the new AIN Ning site with info about upcoming conferences (Trondheim and Chicago). And repository of info for the 2007 conference?

Spoke to the 2007 planning committee about all of this. They're going to take a look at this discussion and contribute their 2 cents.

Leif/Johnnie, what would make it easiest for you to create these pages? Do you need content from someone? Direction? Cookies?

[Sven Veine]

Thanks for working on these topic, Leif and Johnnie! It won't be too long before I have the link to the Trondheim Conference ready, I hope. Then we can have a link from this new static AIN conference page to this. Exiting!

[Johnnie Moore]

Leif I think option 2 sounds good to me so let's try it and see how it looks. If we like it, that means we can really close off the old site and move the Conference info here.

[Leif Hansen]

Just got word back from a tech friend at Ning on those two questions:
": Hi Leif, 1) yes, probably, depending on how you wanted that to work. It would likely require that you request full access to the code though, and this means you would no longer get automatic updates. 2) you can activate a 'pages' in your network. Instructions are here: http://developer.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id=1185512%3ATopic%3A11676 "
So I think #2 should solve our main problem, though visitors could still work their way back to our more 'social' site... is that okay? We would then just give the link out to the static pages for conferences and/or a Member Bio Directory like the old one.
as for his #1 solution, sounds like the con side is that we would be out of the loop for any future 'auto updates' the Ning staff makes in improving this service...

[Leif Hansen]

Hmmm, a number of topics are cropping up (one main one) and I'm not sure who and how to make the final call.
Before I get into that main issue, Daniel I just did a search for Olympia" in the upper right search box and all Olympia related info (pix, forums and your profile) came up. Will that do? If not, I'll have to research how to do a custom field search.

Main issue:
How do we have a cleaner, more 'professional', site (or pages) that give basic conf info and/or member profiles?
I can think of two ways to do this, BUT, I'm not sure WHO needs to be in on the decision nor HOW (conf call?) we should talk about it. Any thoughts...
Honestly, I'm not really up for being responsible for updating another site with info so, unless Johnnie is okay with doing it, my preference would be to create a page here that has the info. If people just gave the link to the direct forum or whatever static page has the conference info, would that be okay? (I'm researching if/how one can create static pages)