Hey Everyone,
I made some changes to the club’s website: Home and want to get your impression and other ideas for small improvements we can do along the way.
Rather than make you guess what the changes are I can give you the list.
None of this is heavy duty web development - so please don’t expect to see something equivalent to Space X… we do bike rides, not rocket ships.
Reorganized the menu
Changed “Home” from a drop down to just the home page link
Changed “Start Here” menu item to “Members”
(I did not update the “start here” page yet, so when you click on “members” it shows the “start here” page)
Added “The Club” page & menu item with drop downs
Shuffled the pages from home & start here to The Club, Member, & Ride
little bits of clean up on some pages where I noticed references to past years
added a massive WCC logo to the homepage - not sure if I like it, interested to get other opinions
For those members that work on or know how we do the website: I have not updated the source file names yet. I wanted to get feedback here then will clean everything up so it matches…or revert to the previous version of the website.
I would say we can add a menu link to the forum at this point. I am hoping to get an update from Tom shortly on development with that and start migration soon.
The big logo looks good on a desktop browser but not the greatest on my phone - it is OK though. I like the idea of the full name.
I actually think it looks great on my phone - does it not scale for you Steven?
This is actually the first time I’ve looked at the website on mobile and I actually think it looks great. For some reason the twitter feed doesn’t load on mobile for me, but does on desktop (Firefox for both). We might want to remove the RWGPS widget since event organization will be through the forum in the future. Similarly, I don’t think we’re really actively maintaining our Youtube and flickr presence, so it might be better to use the icon link like we have for other social media instead of the more prominent feed.
@jeremyhaak I find that firefox desktop does not agree with the website’s twitter embed, but it works on Safari desktop or mobile, and firefox mobile…weird. Probably one of those Google things to push people to Chrome
I’m not sure about removing RWGPS…well removing it right now anyway. That may be a conversation with the ride and IT committee volunteers. I’m sure I know how to delete it but not sure what impact that would have, how much effort it took to set up. It is something to keep on the list.
I see your point about flikr and youtube when viewed on mobile. I can see if this is in my range of skills…otherwise it’s on the list with GWGPS
I like the restructure. The downside is that such change cause changes to the URL for the pages. This will result in page not found errors. It should be easy enough for visitors to find the pages with a search. I wonder if we should put a notice about the reorg on the website itself. I will also take a look to see if we can add a custom message when a page is not found.
When we are ready to retire the old groups, I think the “What’s New” should be replaced with the link to the Discourse forums.
I’m not fond of the large image where it is positioned because as your screenshot shows, you see very little information without without scrolling.
I think the small image in the upper left gives enough branding at the top. At a bare minimum I would like at least the following and possibly mission and vision to be above the image,
Another option would be to replace the image with the logo, but it seems like more branding than is needed. If you would like it to be more obvious that this is the Waterloo Cycling Club, we could add that text over the image.
Agree with @bill on the large image. In fact if I scroll two scroll wheel clicks down, the image tightens up perfectly and creates a nice top border while allowing the Vision/Mission statements to be on the page without the need to scroll. Making the logo smaller would make the ‘above the fold’ page look tighter too. (screen shot with 3 clicks on the scroll wheel downward showing the cropped image)
On that note, the text on the Vision/Mission can be cleaned up so it’s more obvious when your eyes scan this ‘above the fold’ page at first. (e.g. Make the words ‘Vision’ and ‘Mission’ larger/bold and perhaps above the text they represent?)
I like the clean up of the menu items. Much more logical in my brain and easier to navigate.
I see the twitter feed twice on the page, once under the COVID info section and again further down with the other social media items. Not sure if that’s intended?
I also see two flickr album widgets showing images i can scroll through. Again, not sure if that’s intended?
btw…i recommend doing the 1-2 scroll wheel clicks downward on the other pages to create the same dimensioned top border image for consistency across the site. e.g. the road ride page
But good point about the logo image size forcing scrolling.
To immediately address the potential broken links on pages I’ll change the bright green banner with an announcement saying we are making some changes and some links may not work, but we are working on it.
@TommyB
Thanks for the feedback
I’ll look at ways to improve the vision & mission.
These are two feeds:
WCC announcments (we used this as an easy way to make announcements on the website and separate from the regular account so an announcement would not be lost in the thread of regular tweets)
WCC regular twitter feed. we added this so people would not need a social media account to see what we tweeted/posted.
I’ve been contemplating these two this week while I was looking at potential changes, but they go beyond the simple efforts I planned this week
The two flickr widgets were trying to make it easy for people to see some riding and the social event, but these have aged now. Another thing to add to the discussion list of medium effort changes.
I’ll have a look at this and see if it is a home page setting or if I can make the homepage match the other pages.
Sorry. What I was (unclearly) trying to say was to crop the images at the top of each page to a thinner size (like what is seen in my screenshot which I accomplished by scrolling a bit).
In other words…make the image at the top of each page thinner!
@TommyB now that is a fixed google setting. We have 3 options for image banners - Cover (takes up the full screen), large (the current homepage), & banner (what you see on the other pages of the site).
Ok with the feedback, I went spent some time playing around with the site and came up with a different view of the homepage. I’m really interested to know if this is better or worse. Here is a side by side of the last version and current version.
I’ve also gone through and checked/fixed links on the site after I changed the menu layout.
My eyes need more contrast than on the newer version in order to be able to read comfortable. Given my aging eyes I can sympathise with those with vision challenges which is why I tend to lean toward plainer formatting that is easier to read.
Thanks for the feedback Bill & Steven, I agree that we need better contrast so the text is easier to read. I’ll test a few different images & text set ups this week.
The text over the image was an attempt at giving the site a bit more colour and excitement while making efficient use of the homepage space.
I agree with the original being easier to read. Maybe you could cut the middle of the picture out and leave it white (with black text)? Not sure what that would look like aesthetically though.
Another option might be a slow change of picture at the top e.g. it sweeps every 30 seconds. May add some variety?
not sure if I like it, interested to get other opinions
