Improving Website

As some of you know I've been floating ideas around for making our website better. I'm posting them here to start a discussion now and that can hopefully be put to the conference.

One is that we have some bit on the front of the website that's always there called ''On This Day...'' or something a bit like the Wikipedia homepage. But instead there'd be an article about something that happened in Birmingham's history 5 years ago, 88 years ago etc... Not just a line like it on Wikipedia and doesn't need to be more than one, maybe two events.

Rather than writing one every day we could write them in advance and set the website to post it automatically on the correct day. I think it'd be good way of making people want to check the website coz there's something new and relatively accessible there each day at least.

I also want to make the website better more generally. I've been looking around social websites that have won awards lately and one I really like is this American sports website: http://www.sbnation.com/ I've become a bit of an expert in American football lately reading its article...

But anyway it looks really good/navigatable what I most like about it is how it seems to have a sense of a 'community' which our basic Wordpress website can't do. There's a comments section where members have like profile photos and you can click 'rec' if you like a comment, if a comment gets ten then it goes green. So it's like if you see an article with a lot of comments you can skim read the 'good' ones seeing where they are coz they're green.

Then maybe if we get the website more active, we could have like a monthly awards show article for the best member comments.

Apparently we were originally going to have Slaney Street's website be more like that but people thought we didn't have enough nice photos to go with articles.

I also think it needs to be easier for member's to submit articles. Wish there was just a page on the website called 'write an article' where people could just write one however they like under their name if they want and then 'send', and then the editors would get a notice saying like there's an article waiting for approval and we can just check it over and then publish it.