Forums Reorganization?

Incidentally, some more thoughts on articles.

I was hired a couple weeks ago to write daily articles for another site, and I hit the ground running. When I submitted my first draft for discussion, the admin liked it enough to publish it straight away, warts and all. That meant I had to try churning out new articles every evening, which was just impossible. I'm about 4 articles behind, and struggling to queue items up.

So it's a very good idea to build up that stack of articles. Throw in a few filler types that won't become outdated any time soon.

Personally, it takes about 2 hours across two days to come up with a 1000-word article (or review or tutorial) at best. That might be a good benchmark to plan around. 1 week's worth of buffer space per author is probably ideal - so 5 articles for a daily cycle, 1 or 2 for a weekly or bigger cycle.

Renegade - actually, I'd say that Online Business is more advanced. It's about setting up an actual business which most newbies aren't even close to doing. I also added "eCommerce" to that title to clarify

This is mocked up on the test server now:

http://test.webmaster-forums.net
login: twf/fun1ybun1

I did do Option A but the only difference is that red bar with "TWF Feedback and General Discussion". So imagine tht gone if you prefer option B. Liam and I also re-wrote the descriptions so they're shorter and clearer (and also get in some good SE keywords).

Is there anything else you'd like to see changed?

"Marketing, SEO, and Online Business" Doesn't the "Online Business" make the "Marketing" and possibly (but not really) the "SEO" redundant?

Also, I'm not too sure the "Computer Help" section could go in the "Building your website" section either. Is something like "I forgot my Windows XP password, how do I get it back" getting help your computer? Yes. Is it help building your website? No.

May want to reorganise the forums inside the sections as well so that the most basic things are at the top and gets more advance as one goes down the list. Either that or go through it like a process.

For example:
# Promotion and Marketing
# Search Engine Challenges
# Online Business Discussion

Would be:
# Online Business Discussion
# Search Engine Challenges
# Promotion and Marketing

My logic behind that ordering would be, "Online Business Discussion" is a little generic so can be regarded as "basic." SEO second because one should IMHO get listed before doing a lot of promotion and marketing.

Who hasn't voted yet??? Once we get this finalized we might be able to go about doing it. I might start making some of the modifications on test.

I'm definitely preferring A right now - if we moved Critiques to Community Centre in B there would be 7 forums in that seciton (too many). That's the main difference.

Abhi wrote:

Megan wrote: So I think we might rename General Discussion to Off-Topic or something like that. This person also suggested renaming Search Engine Challenges to Search Engine Optimization.

I agree with both.

So do I

And ideally we would like to have articles stacked-up, ready to release. As Megan was saying, I had the idea of doing this automatically, but we don't have to do that straight away.

Hopefully, if the Drupal link isn't too difficult it would be better to do it that way in the first place. Even if linking with Drupal takes a little more time, I won't then have to copy all the articles across. Which would be a burden.

Possibly, I'm not sure. Liam was talking about doing something so that the articles would be released automatically on a certain date. Then we wouldn't be rushing to get something released at the right time. I think if we have it as a forum (temporarily) it can be a little more informal. The danger with a regular schedule is that people will get annoyed if you don't stick to it.

I got a little feedback on this at TAZ. One person pointed out the conflict between Webmaster's Corner and General Disscussion - he thought they were the same thing. So I think we might rename General Discussion to Off-Topic or something like that. This person also suggested renaming Search Engine Challenges to Search Engine Optimization.

BTW, make sure to vote for your favourite layout! We only have 3 votes so far. We can still tweak it once we decide on which basic layout we like best.

Just to check, we are going to release these articles on a regular period right? As in, not releasing them all at the same time?

Something like Once every fortnight or month or something.

Don't worry about the Articles getting done too quick sweetie. Well, actually, I have 4 pretty much done that I could post, and your Web Standards report could be modified as aritcles and it sounds like Tim has some he's working on too.

I'm going to post this over at TAZ to get a third party opinion. Especially on backend/server-side and Center/Centre, and Guide/Tutortial/Article.

Have decided I don't care about Backend Programming after all, am also throwing my lot in with the option B's with a caveat that Critiques should be under "Care in the Community" or whatever it's called.

Community Centre should definately be spely with the English spelling. England's the smallest country with the biggest ego so we're damn well going to spell it that way! I honestly don't think it will cause any problems.

I like the college slant, give everything cute names then collectively call it "Articles."

Also, before integrating articles with the forum it might be an idea to let me play around with these Drupal connectors. No sense in commiting to using the forum for articles if doing the whole lot will take less time than we expect. In addition I'd have to move all the articles from the forum into the new system, which might be very labour intensive (depending on the number of articles and if I have to reproduce formatting).

I was thinking about that too, Tim. It's not newbies though, it's Americans Everyone else spells it with an -re. So do we want to go with the American spelling (the supposed majority) or should we use it as a little way to brand ourselves as an international site? We do seem to be getting a lot of members from the UK lately.

Don't sorry about the "guide" thing for now, we can worry about that when the time comes.

We might need to vote on Backened vs. Server-side. I don't really care either way as long as it's clear to everyone.

Well, just keep in mind that if several of we moderators are a little confused by it, your average member is probably more likely to be confused. Whether you believe the meanings are similar or not.

Anyway, I like option B personally. I like the fact that we don't have specific technologies/languages listed on the Backend Programming, so it doesn't exclude anything.

I wonder if calling the section Community Centre would put off any newbies who are used to the Center spelling. I know it wouldn't have bothered me, but would there be any validity to just calling it Community?

Because "Beginner's guide" is a bit more catchy???" Overview is a little on the dull site. I do not agree that guide would be confused with tutorial, at all. Guide is very clear. Do a quick google search for "guide" - no tutorials there. On the other hand, Liam and I were talking the other day about doing a series of intro to web standards articles rather than just one so there might not be a need to use that term. We could go with a college slant and call them "Web standards 101" or something like that. (just an idea!!)

BUT, as I said, those are really very rough ideas now. Nothing has been written yet or is even close to being written. We can iron that out when the time comes. I just posted it to give you an idea of what we were thinking of publishing, not for critique.

Lets get back to the original topic. Forums organization. Shall we vote on Option A or B?? I keep swinging back and forth, but I like A right now. For "news and reviews", I think we could keep that for a start but change it if/when people start posting site critiques in there. That would go in Community Centre or General Chat until we got the articles area up and running.

This is the current version:

http://admmail.uwaterloo.ca/~mjjack/TWF_reorganization.html

Any ideas for organization of the Community Centre area? I've fiddled around with that and I'm not sure what order would make most sense.

I think I see what you're talking about as far as what the subjects would be, and I have to agree that (in my opinion) we should probably not call it a Guide. It is a bit misleading, making it seem like it might be tutorials instead. You mentioned the word Overview. Why don't we just call it Overviews?

I just think we have to tread carefully with titles, can be a big turn off if people expect one thing and get another.
Do a search for such and such and get a link farm, you keep moving
Go to a shop to buy X item, they ran out last season, you look elsewhere ...

I don't see Guide and Tutorial being the same thing. By guide here I mean more of an overview. Overview of what web standards are, who invented them, and some non-specific info on how to use them. NOT a step by step process (tutorial) or detailed instructions. Think of, for example, a tour guide. A guide will show you around but won't get into too much detail or step-by-step instructions or anything like that

Not trying to argue or anything here, but isn't "Beginner’s Guide" and "Tutorial" the same thing?
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=guide ,results are disappointing for tutorial at dictionary.com (gee that site is getting slow to load nowadays)
tu·to·ri·al
n.
Something that provides special, often individual instruction, especially:
1. A book or class that provides instruction in a particular area.

I could write the table/css debate but am sure you wouldn't like the end result so wouldn't be able to write what I wanted. No matter how much 'proof' is showed it's a no win situation.
Is like the guy who said the world was round, I believe he was stoned to death for being so obsured.
enough of that.

Are these article ideas going to be commentable (<-my new word) by members?

Just had an idea (yeah and it hurt ) how about a 20min debate once a week on a random topic, free for all. Could be a good way to get ideas and inspirations for new articles etc. Only rules are the forum rules (language, promotion ...) and after 20 mins the thread is locked. It would have to be at a time when mods are normally on as it could spill over to the threads, but then again could be good as it provokes member input, debate (which is healthly), information ...

He said he didn't want to write stuff though, that's the main reason for that... (unless, Busy, you would but we could iron that out when the time comes)

ETA: don't pay too-too much attention to that. It's just a rough list of ideas, nothing's definite at all. I just posted it to give a rough idea of what we're planning on publishing. Feel free to let me know if you have more ideas for articles.

(apologies in advance for the length of this post)

Oh, don't stop giving your feedback!!

The difference between articles and tutorials, as I see it, is that tutorials are more of a step-by-step instruction as opposed to general commentary and information in articles. The w3schools site does tutorials. Lots of sites do other types of tutorials on how to use photoshop or how to do specific techniques or things like that. I could see us doing a few tutorials on specific things but it should be more general information in articles. So instead of, say, writing tutorials about how to use Photoshop we might have an article comparing Photoshop with the Gimp. A tutorial we might do on that theme could be on how to use the Gimp to do a technique previously demonstrated in Photoshop.

Tutorials are also a lot of work, they've been done extensively elsewhere, and if we were going to do it we would have to do it comprehensively. And besides, I don't really want to write tutorials Too much work since you have to be really careful about writing clear instructions, doing screenshots or different versions of code and all that. Can't be bothered

Here are the article ideas we have in Basecamp already:

Quote:
Beginner’s Guides/Introductory articles

- Beginner’s Guide to Web Standards
- Introduction to Semantics
- Beginner’s Guide to Blogging
- Beginner’s Guide to ???? (could be anything)
- Beginner’s Guide to Design Software

(these are more overviews rather than step-by-step tutorials, although there could be some more practical tutorials as follow-up)

Design Articles:

- Colour Scheming for the Un-coordinated (Part I: how to choose a colour scheme; Part II: Sample schemes, free for the taking)
- Why tiny text is bad for your site
- Top 5 Mistakes in Forum Design
- Writing for the Web
- The Importance of the “Fold”

Tutorials

- Series of articles on how to do page layouts with CSS (seems to be big lack of introductory resources out there. How does one begin to learn to design sites using CSS rather than tables? What are the basic techniques? How to do basic layouts etc.); also summary of methods for doing multi-column layouts and the pros/cons of each
- Methods of extracting images from a background using Photoshop (I have this basically written at work)
- Using masking and layer effects in Photoshop (also basically written)

Reviews

- “Have you tried the Gimp lately” – Overview of the Gimp, with the summary point that it’s just as good as Photoshop for the average web designer, and free!
(I think Greg has a bunch of stuff he’d like to do here)

Editorials/Debates/Opinion etc.

- Debate: CSS or Tables for Web Page Layout? Possibly Liam vs. DaveyBoy; Megan to do summary piece bridging the two extremes.
- Survey of big name designers asking the question: What is a designer? What should a web designer be concerned with? Would you use this term to describe yourself or would you use something else? Contact Zeldman, Moll, Meyer, all those people. Good article for our site AND makes them aware of who we are (with the ultimate goal of being mentioned in one of their blogs!!)
- Why are all the web design bloggers Male? (Megan)

Abhi’s Ideas

(need to copy from forums…)

Other

- Must Read Articles (probably a multi-part series); thinking of things like Cameron Moll’s articles, some of ALA’s, things like that.
- Regular “Blogroll” or summary of what is going on in the Web Design blogs
- Switching from PC to Mac (Tim)
- Switching from Windows to Linux (Liam)

So, it's a bit of a jumble of different sort of things. Much along the lines of what ALA does - some articles, some opinion pieces, some tutorials - whatever we can get people to write.

Megan wrote: did you want to start writing tutorials?

I dunno, that's really up to you as you're in charge.
Just ignore me, was thinking that really we were going to be writing tutorials, but was wrong.

As for making general chat et al. seperate: Would prefer it to all be under one heading but Critiques being under Community Centre is even better (good to see the correct spelling in there!).

And that's all you'll hear about it from me, am happy with whatever (as long as things are spelt correctly i.e. centre, colour etc.)

Or, Liam, did you want to start writing tutorials? That is quite a different direction from what we've been discussing. Maybe small tutorials on specialized techniques but I really see that as part of my vision for this site. I also thought that the Reviews idea would be a good way to easily add content. IMO the context there makes it clear that it's not for critiques.

For naming forums, simplicity and clarity should come before accuracy if it comes down to that. That's how we ended up with "web page authoring" - trying to be perfectly accurate isntead of perfectly clear.

I don't know that server side scripting is even working as it is though. We seem to end up with a lot of PHP questions in Webmaster's Corner. I'd like to follow the HTML, CSS, and Javascript convention there too. So ASP, PHP, and what??? Then it's immediately obvious and people don't have to think about what that means even for a second.

Articles are what we are posting, definitely NOT tutorials. I'm not sure that we want to get into the business of doing tutorials at all.

Reviews is what I meant to include with the News. Reviews of software, books etc.

I was trying to keep the number of forums in the Community Centre to a minimum. So you guys would prefer Option A with general chat separate? One of the things I liked about option B is that there is one less section block.

Here's a minor update:

http://admmail.uwaterloo.ca/~mjjack/TWF_reorganization.html

Wow, I'm actually agreeing with everything Busy has just said. Especially the:

Busy wrote: Backend Programming -> seems a bit to advanced, Server-side IMO is more user friendly, or newbie friendly

Server-side is the accepted and well known name so it should really be kept as that. Backend programming is a little too ambiguous, it could mean almost anything whereas Server-side implies there is a client - server connection.

Apart from that I like it (particularly option A)! Never would have thought of doing that myself, but now I look at it does need doing.

I'm going to have to be different and say A
Mainly because
"News and Interesting links" is better than "News and Reviews" - people could confuse reviews for website critiques

"Computer Help" is in Community Centre, doesn't suit being in Building Your Website

"Market Place" is on Community Centre already

"Website Critiques" in the Community Centre or Marketing, SEO, and Online Business. Reason being it is what is usually done after the website is done and a lot of the faults or adjustments are SE based or design based, hmmm maybe it might need to be in Building Your Website
---------------
Webmaster's Corner -> Website design, Website Creation, Webmaster Q & A, Web Page Authoring ?
Backend Programming -> seems a bit to advanced, Server-side IMO is more user friendly, or newbie friendly

Web Database Development - > Does it need the 'web' in the title?

Articles -> Would tutorials be a better label? Articles are usually linked to, or referenced from

I like option B. I think Reddy is right, Marketplace should go under Community Centre.

I like Option B but with Market Place in Community Centre. Otherwise a good list.

Here's another option:

http://www.webmaster-forums.net/forums_organization.html

Option B is just a little modification on the first one. Come to think of it, it will be best to keep the "interesting links" in the fine print because otherwise we'll get a lot of spam.