SCN: SCN site and logo redesign

[Rod Clark]

> As to the menu layout - it needs a lot of work.  Rod mentioned finding the
> astromy club - well try finding the vintage telephone equipment museum.
> Or any of the other pages I edit - University Christian Church, Telephone
> Pioneers.  We made an easy to get around menu very difficult.

Lois, 

   The Vintage Telephone Equipment Museum is featured in bold
type near the top of the main Science and technology menu, along
with the other science and technology sites hosted on SCN.

   The University Christian Church is featured in bold type near
the top of the main Spirituality menu, along with the other
spirituality sites hosted on SCN.

   The Telephone Pioneers, as a service club, are similarly
listed near the top of the main Civic menu. But they could also
be listed on one or two other menus if you'd like to choose
which menus those would be.

   The 1996-1999 site had one page per major subject area. So
each page grew very long. A viewer couldn't tell what headings
the page contained by glancing at the top of the page, as now.
Users had to read an entire lengthy page from top to bottom,
before they even knew what headings were on it. If they guessed
wrong about what was on the page, then it was off to the next
menu, to similarly scour it from top to bottom before
understanding even the outlines of what was on it. In short, the
user comments about that site were more serious after about
mid-1999 or so, by which time the pages had grown so long, than
your comments about the current site.
   
   A tree structured site, similar in layout to Yahoo, the Open
Directory and others, does present a more complicated structure
than our former design that had one enormously long page per
subject. People have trouble finding things in those directories
too, even with generally good subject categorization, which
generally speaking we do have. That's why they each have
prominent search functions, as does SCN.

   The first two SCN Web sites (the original site whose front
page is preserved in the 1995 Rand Corporation report, and Tom
Sparks' 1995 black-background site) were little more than this:

       http://www.scn.org/community/sites.html

and a few disclaimer pages and a brief FAQ and user registration
form, etc. 

   You can still find that IP list on SCN, by clicking the
Community button or the Community sidebar link on any page on
the site. It's the first link on the body of the main Community
menu page, "Sites Hosted on SCN - Alphabetical List."

   We've come a lot further than that since then, and as a
result we do have the continuing problem of how to make
everything that's valuable on SCN easily findable on a large
site. That's not such a bad problem to have, as problems go, and
the Community subject areas on SCN are respectably organized
compared to other such sites. For comparison, you might want to
look at some of the larger community network sites like our
bigger neighbor to the south in Oregon, EFN.org. 

   But it's the content of SCN's community sections that makes
SCN stand out among community networks. We have been a great
deal friendlier to controversial and officially frowned-upon
grassroots sites that are not wanted on, say, the City of
Seattle site and that would be excluded from many community
networks elsewhere in the country that are run by government
agencies or as partnerships with government or AT&T or other
such interests. Gripe as much as you like about SCN, but it's
not easy to find another site that has as consistently upheld
community networking's ideals as SCN has. Or as it did until the
recent wave of aviodance of controversy (in my view, basically
the avoidance of democracy) on the home page, wrapped in a guise
of "professionalism," and other such recent directions that
SCN's leadershp has gone in.

Rod Clark

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