Articles & the non Forum part of the site

[David Karp]

Preparing an article for the LF Home Page is pretty fun. It is also rewarding. I scoured the page when I first started thinking about going to LF, and it was very helpful. Creating an article reviewing a camera or on a subject that continually pops up is a way to give something back to the community.

I highly recommend it. Even if it is not illustrated, it can be useful.

[Brian Wallen]

QT, glad to hear your comments, since I can see significant administrative overhead to some of these ideas. Funneling pages through one person who insures the health of the site and some uniformity in site organization can overburden the person in that position. Do you foresee a problem here? Are there user group ways and permissions that could make this process more decentralized so that others could share the administrative burden?

I've made a few offers in my pages to help members who may have useful information, but not the technical background to present this information. If that information fits well within my site content and audience I am glad to host pages; if it fits more appropriately in the LFP site, I'd be glad to work with some page designs that we agreed were consistent with a site plan.

I've seen other comments here that suggest that others might have Web design background that they would be willing to offer. How can we organize our efforts?

Are there other ideas about some kind of structure for encouraging upgraded graphics/page design content while assessing member concern about responsiveness of text oriented pages? What has been the experience of long time members and those involved in site administration to trying to establish and enforce guidelines? It seems to me that most of the people that use this site get along pretty well without being probed and prodded. Are gentle suggestions adequate?

Maybe this would be better as an off-forum discussion: What vulnerability issues should we be concerned about in trying to promote more varied content? What kinds of content are reasonable to allow? Particularly active content? What kinds of hosting limitations dictate some of these standards?

In my concerted effort to try to build more extensive linkage between my LF site and the LFP site, I wanted to have an icon that visually identified LFP links. I made my own little version that I derived from the LFP header. Maybe we want something better than my 10 minute version that we recommend people use. My only criteria were that it has a visual similarity to some LFP graphic, that it be large enough to recognize, but small enough to use in a line of text as a link icon.

Sorry for the shotgun approach, but these were just some things that occurred to me might be relevant to this effort.

[Brian Wallen]

David, I think that your long, recent article on lenses would have been considerably less effective without the images. The way you have used them helps organize the text, even when you are not using an image in a diagrammatic way. I find it a lot more readable and navigable just paging through it than if it were just text. While there are a generous number of graphics, I didn't find that loading it over a dial connection was expecially pokey.

This page would be a good model to recommend to people who wanted to add images to existing or revised text pages, since it doesn't require tables, frames or styles that may be daunting to people who may not be very familiar with html. It wouldn't be difficult to write a straightforward how-to that explained a few html tags and showed people how to do this with a text editor and preview pages with a browser for those not interested in learning how to use an html editor.

I think that the LFP site has succeeded because we are sharing information and not Web development chops, so keeping it accessible for contributions is probably important to the people who use the site. Making it too glitzy with fancy Web techniques may scare away those who don't have the skills to do that.

I think I've read forum posts that opined that this wasn't a site where "we" wanted to emphasize images of members, but more the information about techniques and equipment. Should the site be doing some surveying to see what the majority of members would like to see? Minority groups?

[David Karp]

Thanks Brian. I agree that adding the photos helped my article. However, there are many articles without illustrations that are very useful, so if the choice is an article without illustrations or none at all, I would go for the former every time.

[Scott Knowles]

Interesting conversation, and having looked at the non-forum Website, it would be significant work to redesign it. You can do it in a more compact, user-friendly style, using newer html coding or scripts, but you'd be relying on the users have the equal display capability, and as we know with MS' IE, that means developing scripts specifically for IE's flavors.

The question(s) would be how best to accommodate the entire structure and organization in a simple design and presentation and still easily manageable. One alternative to all the information Web pages would be converting them to PDF's which would greatly reduce the Web pages, as well as the continued updated, just update the PDF, link date, and roll on, and allowing easier file savings and printing. But that's takes additional disk space as PDF's aren't small.

Having been a Website manager and Web designer, developer and code writer for the federal government (1994-2005) and myself (2006-2009), you need, as suggested, some preparation work, which takes resources, meaning people and time. Having been there, that's the hardest job. The mechanics of implementation later are another issue.

I'll keep listening and reading.