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SPOTLIGHT AGENCIES

Calling all - website upgrade coming, need your help

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Written By tech - 8 September, 2008

Praja Announcement suggestion Praja related Site updates No Location

This website is our primary tool for interaction, coordination, and attracting new members. We have been lucky enough to get attention and grow, however the site may not have kept pace. Based on your feedback, we are on to a revamp. The things we have heard fall in these main categories

  1. Lots of content, hard to find and track them
  2. Site is getting slower
  3. Unfriendly for new visitors - they don't know how to signup,  find posts, problems logging in etc
  4. Need more tools for member-member interaction. Private Messages are not enough.

So we are starting on a project to address these issues over next few weeks. Towards that, we will appreciate some help from members. No, no, we aren't asking folks to come and code, not yet :) As of now, we need help in following forms:

  • Report problems you know (in categories mentioned above)
  • Help out with testing the new website (we have a separate testng-only website)
  • Suggest how you want the pages (frontpage, post pages) to be structured or layed out.

You can leave comments here, or simply send private message or email to "admin".

 

COMMENTS

Have a place for file sharing

srkulhalli - 8 September, 2008 - 13:32

Have a place where one could upload files and one could point to them for discussion

My items

swamy - 8 September, 2008 - 04:29

Have two separate home pages, one for regular members (veterans), second one for new visitors. You can educate new visitors about Praja and the website also on the second special home page.

Also, looks like only some people can blog, we can only post in forums. Please allow everybody to blog, anyway nobody has been posting bad things.

Orkut like scrapbook for all members.

Allow members to post pictures and documents.

city based home page

silkboard - 8 September, 2008 - 19:17

Separate landing page for each city is a long pending request and amust do now.

Thanks

admin123 - 17 September, 2008 - 08:48

Sir, thank you very much for your insightful suggestions. As we grow, we have been recognising the need to better organise the content on the site both visually and taxonomically. We are currently working on reorganising the site into separate subdomains to facilitate organisation based on cities. The next thing we are working in parallel is the redesign of front page and the whole website. Your suggestions are indeed very useful as users perspective. Rest assured that we will do our best to implement them. We do not have the luxury of dedicated technical personnel for running this website and most work is voluntary currently. This means that we dont see things moving as quickly as we wish. Please bear with us. Currently, we have launched a new feature called 'My Praja' that we suppose would be useful for logged in users to track their favourite topics and posts. Please have a look at it when you can (just click on 'My Praja' on the top menu). We would love to hear more from you and other users about the usability aspects and suggestions for improvement. -Admin

Organizing the entire content efficiently: some points

psaram42 - 17 September, 2008 - 08:25

The current Praja web site is totally mixed up. The whole site needs to be professionally organized. Currently there is “splashed up” text appearing all around, totally confusing the viewer. The primary reason may be that it is modeled on Google blogger style, which has to cater for the general public blogging. However Praja can do better as its agenda is specific to Praja. Some points that come to my mind are:

1.      When some one enters the site through the link http://Praja.in/ a clean page should come up with a simple logo of “Praja” as it is now. The current logo is excellent. How ever the scenery Lal Bagh glass house, Court, Vidhana Soudha and greenery occupies a lot of real estate, giving the site a Typical Indian Babu looks. This could be done away with to save space.

2.      This page should be for the general public and members. However members can login too if they wish so.

3.      A page can be divided into say 3 zones, with each zone reserved for different sections, like Core activities, Site specific details and visitors / member specific.

4.      The entry page zone-1 should contain the main activity around the blog entries of the content creators and the other Forum Topics thrown out for discussion by the other ordinary members. By clicking the blog button the list of all Bloggers should pop up, so that any one blogger can be selected. Then the all the blog entries and comments can be browsed in this window. Similarly the Forum topics via the Forum button. The Button Tree looks some thing like this:

a.       Praja Logo

b.      Blogs

                                                               i.      Slik Board

                                                             ii.      Tralesubba

                                                            iii.      Etc

c.       Forum

                                                               i.      F1

                                                             ii.      F2

                                                            iii.      Etc

5.      Similarly the entry page zone-2 button tree

a.       About

b.      Policies

c.       Know

d.      Care

e.       Participate

f.        Etc

6.      Entry Page zone-3

a.       Login

                                                               i.      Box For name

                                                             ii.      Box For Pass word

                                                            iii.      Button Login

b.      New Account

7.      The Login Page Zone-1 Button tree

a.       Blogs

b.      Forums

c.       Events

d.      Etc

8.      The Login Page zone-2 Button tree

a.       New

b.      Comments

c.       Etc

9.      The Login Page zone-3

a.       Logged in member list

b.      Chat

c.       Conference

d.      etc

10.  Logout Button

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