SCN: SCN site and logo redesign

[Kenneth Applegate]

On Wed, 29 Aug 2001, Rod Clark wrote:

> > 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.

Rod - Are we _really_ on the same page? :>) I mean that literally. If you
are referring to the pages:

http://www.scn.org/tech/
http://www.scn.org/spiritual/
http://www.scn.org/civic/

then your statements to Lois are simply NOT correct. The only things
showing at the top of those pages are general subtopic headings. To find
the specific links to the organizations that you mention, you have to
scroll the pages.

Ken 

> 
> 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
> 
> 

Ken Applegate           How do you identify astronomers from Seattle? 
<starsrus at scn.org>      By the windshield wipers on their telescopes!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *  From the Listowner  * * * * * * * * * * * *
.	To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to:
majordomo at scn.org		In the body of the message, type:
unsubscribe scn
==== Messages posted on this list are also available on the web at: ====
* * * * * * *     http://www.scn.org/volunteers/scn-l/     * * * * * * *