First off, credit must go where credit is due. Mad props to Miles, Joey, Lauren, and Andrew for working their hearts out on getting the redesign out last night (especially Lauren, who had a final this morning, and Joey, who had been running on zero sleep from the night before). The short story of it is that, although we did a significant amount of work in the past weeks, there was still a lot left to do before we could even think of moving the theme from the sandbox to the the main website. We started that process around midnight Pacific and took the site off maintenance mode around 2:30 am Pacific, after I laid down in bed, almost passed out, and then remembered that I had to remove the maintenance splash.
All in all, the homepage is looking really good. Lauren came through with a nice graphic for the top right lead slot, we put together images and copy for the featured projects, and the footer came together. The homepage might still need:
- Final copy edit for all of the text on the page. We might want to have Miles write something for the Managed Hosting slot in preparation for the announcement tomorrow, and then update the Network Spotlight and Edit Flow Project.
- The most recent blog posts. This was a suggestion Max made, and I was trying to think where they’d fit the best. I might try taking out one of the featured projects in favor of a list of most recent posts.
- Working links to projects and contact. Right now those links 404 but we do intend to launch pages for them soon.
Other than that, it’s looking really, really good. A remarkable improvement from what we have before.
Continue reading ‘Version three website relaunch: Things left to do’
It’s good to back in the swing of things with our weekly group calls! This one was chock of full goodness.
Before I get into the details, I’d like to welcome Vanessa Bezic, who is joining me as a co-host on This Week in CoPress, season two. Vanessa is a recent graduate of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, where she studied broadcast journalism. She learned about CoPress this spring from David Cohn, who is now on our board of directors.
Now, on to the call:
We first discussed the Web site redesign, which will launch on Monday. In addition to a post about the redesign on the main blog, look out for another announcement about hosting.
The next item involved an informative video Lauren Rabaino created about innovation. She’ll soon be working on another one as part of our new educational video series.
Continue reading ‘August 17, 2009: Back to the weeklies’
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I think that it’s going to be pretty important to integrate search into our website in a highly-functional fashion. The tool I propose we use for this is Google Custom Search because it will be easy to set up a search engine to index the main website, the forum, the wiki, the microblog, and Inside CoPress. The bigger question is how we incorporate it into the design. I bring this up now because MediaWiki has a built in search that is currently in the sidebar of the new theme Andrew is building. One idea is to have it in the sidebar, but we could also try to incorporate it into the header. Thoughts?
On the call this evening were Adam, Joey, Greg (although we, humorously and sadly, forgot to add Greg for the first 30 minutes), Miles, Andrew, Lauren and myself. Andrew Dunn and Cody Brown joined us until they mysteriously disappeared from the internet.
We started off the conversation by running through the website redesign we’ve been working on for the last couple of weeks. For history and posterity, this is where we’re at (although both the images and copy are not set in stone; we’re having an epic Basecamp conversation about the merits and demerits of our proposed slogan):
The original, original goal was to relaunch last Tuesday or thereabouts. After we completely blew through that, I moved the draft day to Thursday and then launch over Saturday. That didn’t happen either. Our goal now is to launch as soon as we put the finishing touches on a few last things.
Continue reading ‘August 9, 2009: I ain’t no spaghetti’
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Just wanted to share some mockups of our site design and get some feedback. The following are two potential landing pages for the blog. Note: the header has been changed significantly since these mockups were created.
For the next hour or so, I shall scour the internets for inspiration on the redesign and relaunch of version three of our website. I’m looking for headers, footers, ways of presenting content; an all out armada of inspiration. Hopefully this will get us over designers-block as we do a refresh. If something in this analysis seems funny, it’s because I’ve been on the phone several hours today and going since 8 am, much like every day 
I will probably link to Pixelmatrix Design’s website more than once in this post. It’s simple, gorgeous, and elegant. The logo stands on it’s own really well, and I appreciate the smart approach to color. It covers the elements we need in our header: logo and primary navigation. If you check out his website, I think he also does the intro text quite well.
Another beautiful design. This time the logo is stronger, and again can stand on its own, and the primary navigation pops out a bit more. I’m a fan of how the active page is visually distinguishable from the rest, although I’m not entirely sold on square buttons.
Continue reading ‘CoPress dot org version three design inspiration’
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