so i'm putting up a new drupal 6 site for my town...things to know: town is very, very wired, right outside boston, mostly verizon fios and comcast/rcn high speed cable, penetration over 90ish percent, reasonably affluent white collar community, etc...very strong focus on education and school system, town services and so on...
when i first went about putting out sketches for this new site, because it is just ME doing it unofficially, i was thinking all newspaper style, like a fastcompany.com type of site with nice crisp block layouts (panels and views type stuff)...sections like the town newspaper...
but then i realized that the whole point was about 'connectedness' (i know, i know, very fluffy) and i wanted to encourage interaction above just plain readership...particularly with forums and all of that...
so after years of working on highly ornate sites, feature rich, yadda yadda, i've kind of come to believe that it should be super super simple..
i've now gone about face, using the fblike theme created a site that looks a lot like facebook visually - very simple, 2 colors, etc - and the main way around to these sections (community forums and all of that, book for town guide, pages for local businesses and so on) is just shortcut links on the navigation (will wind up being two rows, maybe not)...and the only blocks that show on the one side column are navigation, recent blogs, new forums and new users - that's it...
i've put in some assorted mods, plan to document this all later when it's really ready to roll, but the key ones are 'friends' and 'notice feed' - these go hand in hand to mimic facebook's add a friend feature (confirmation goes out via email, recipient must confirm) and in turn a 'friend tracker' (notice feed) that gives you all sorts of updates like 'jim has posted a new blog' or 'suzy and jim' are now friends...but none of that application facebook crap (think 'throw a zombie at me' etc)
and to be honest, getting around and finding stuff is SOOOO much easier - there's less crap in the way, no ridiculous gimicky features that make sense on a different kind of site - and the many mods i've used are tiny or back end or generally not intrusive (like print this page, external link icon, etc)
and of course, NO tinymce or bbcode, just like a youtube type of site, no need for it - focus is discussion and not decorated content...
...but then i kind of go back and forth on all of it...i mean, you all live someplace, right? if you were putting up a site for your town now, in the year 2008, knowing now what you've been through on tons of sites that have tried to get you to join, and the focus is really your own physical neighbors - not colleagues at work or linkedin business connections or myspace fan pages buddies - would you think this makes more or less sense than the traditional newspaper approach???
these people need to find it very easy to add content and discuss things without feeling like they're wading through tons of picture-heavy block-loaded pages, 3 columns, etc...and i know that a solid designer could achieve the same effect with a newspaper, but it's still gonna be a newspaper orientation, y'know?
