Loomio
Thu 4 Jun 2020 7:29PM

Improving the website design? Ideas, volunteers?

LS Leo Sammallahti Public Seen by 18
  1. Anyone here who is good with Wordpress?

    @Sam Peters has said he could probably help us out, anyone else interested in improving the sites design let me know.

  2. Any ideas on how to improve the site?

    1. I would replace the "Latest Posts" right sidebar (highlighted in red) with one that would include the latest "Best Articles Of The Month" top 3 winners. The most recent posts are already shown below the top post (highlighted in blue).

    2. I would add a small banner somewhere where readers are encouraged to join as a member. If there is someone interested in designing the banner let me know.

    3. Would add categories somewhere as @Sam Peters already mentioned. Currently we could create at least the following categories - Co-operatives (11 articles), Trade Unions (4 articles). Once the site grows there's going to be more categories (we already have 2 articles on land value taxation and 3rd on the way, and a second article about right to repair movement coming along, etc.)

TF

Tyler Freeman Thu 4 Jun 2020 7:38PM

The thing that I would love, and would really make this idea take off, is if I can vote for an article directly on the article page itself, after I've read it. There's a big disconnect when I read a bunch of articles, then a month later I'm asked to rate/vote on them. Honestly I don't have time to go digging through the list and try to remember what I read and which ones I liked the most.

I'm imagining a simple button at the end of the article that's a "tip the author" or "upvote this article" or something. You can click it as many times as you want if you want to distribute your votes that way. Then at the end of the month, your membership fee is distributed proportionally to your votes with that button.

The button would also serve as a sort of advertisement to people who haven't signed up yet, so they can learn how the system works.

SP

Sam Peters Thu 4 Jun 2020 9:20PM

I run a few different sites, but they're all activist organizations so they don't publish much if at all. I have a background in programming, so I can do custom CSS & some higher-level stuff, too. I looove experimenting with WordPress, and I think it'd be good to implement ideas that the community wants to try. @Tyler Freeman if you want to start a new thread on your idea, I'd be down to help narrow it down into something more specific. Once we have specification, we can bring it to a vote. I'm not sure if there's some procedure you want to go through @Leo Sammallahti @Iwan Doherty ?

If we make some categories, we can download this plugin called "Category Posts" that'll allow us to add widgets similar to "Latest Posts" except it's "Latest <category> Posts". We could use that to implement the "Best articles of the month" widget. There are also Twitter and Facebook plugins that display those social feeds which might be nice. There's a bunch of cool plugins that provide nice functionality.

JB

Jonathan Bean Wed 10 Jun 2020 12:29PM

I like the ideas here. I do think it would be great to have an integrated points system, I could do some research to see if any Wordpress plugins can do it, there are plugins for a lot of things. Also maybe just a better theme with all the features we want would be a good purchase.

I would like to see author bio pages with links to connect with authors or to learn more about their works.

Tags and categories would be essential. We could look at how the P2P foundation uses categories. like this one: https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/how-does-a-multistakeholder-co-op-work/2017/12/20?cn-reloaded=1

But just a few, for now, would be great.

It would be better if we could have the option to vote right after reading it like @Tyler Freeman suggests because I do find it difficult to vote for these once a month and then I am biased towards the ones I have most recently read.

I think displaying how many points each article gets would be great to motivate people to want to subscribe so that they can influence the website and help rank the articles.

I think 100 points per month would be ideal and you allocate them to each article after you read it and can adjust votes up to a month later.

The Medium.com membership pays authors based on how much time the members spend reading something, so maybe in the future it would good to have a feature that automatically suggests how many points to give each article based upon how much time you spend reading them.

So I think Facebook like buttons on each article would be a good start, with the count on it.

I think we could ask other pubs which Wordpress themes they have had the best experience with.

I have worked with Wordpress some and have researched many plugins years ago to build sustainy.org

TF

Tyler Freeman Wed 10 Jun 2020 3:19PM

Neat! I can make the button pretty easily. I was just wondering if there's an existing system/database that I need to integrate into? Is there documentation on how the existing voting system works?

LS

Leo Sammallahti Wed 10 Jun 2020 2:04PM

@Jonathan Bean Would you be able to help out with improving the design of the wordpress site alongside @Jonathan Bean? We could have a call to discuss how to go about it.

JB

Jonathan Bean Wed 10 Jun 2020 3:58PM

Do you mean alongside @Sam Peters and @Tyler Freeman?

Yeah, I can help and do a call to discuss this.

I am also doing the platform coops now course by platform.coop and Mondragon university for 8 weeks from last week. for the second 4 weeks in July we will be developing a platform coop of our choice and I have thought about doing it for Mutual Interest Media and Social.coop.

Is anyone else doing the course?

LS

Leo Sammallahti Wed 10 Jun 2020 5:40PM

Yes absolutely if @Tyler Freeman is able to help out he is more than welcome to do so, just wasn't sure whether that was implied in his comment!

The system Tyler describes is something I would be very fond of, and would presume it would pass a membership vote. However, it might be technically quite challenging compared to other more basic improvements we could do (categories, members vote sidebar, etc.), so I would suggest we consider prioritising those first.

JB

Jonathan Bean Thu 18 Jun 2020 7:43PM

This week is a bit busy since I took the responsibility to be a Bernie Sanders Delegate in Virginia, so I just have to go to some meetings and then vote 5 people that I want to be part of the DNC which decides the agenda and plans for the Democratic party. But next week maybe after Thursday, we could arrange a call to discuss more about what improvements we want and how to make them.

I also want to propose that we install the plugin for https://murmurations.network/ to get our project and posts curated into their directories and maps. It should be very easy to install since it is Wordpress. It would also be helpful for them as well to get more projects in their network.

cc: @Sam Peters

LS

Leo Sammallahti Thu 18 Jun 2020 7:44PM

Awesome, you're the man!

AK

Avi (Dr KBH) Wed 4 Nov 2020 2:45PM

Could you line up the website title and subtitle, as one is stage left and the other centred. In addition the title is using Wordpress' header image function, this is ok but it is not necessarily the sharpest image that has been used. I used to do wordpress development and happy to make these quick small but important tweaks if you need

Load More