Reorganizing This Web Site
This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.
It's time to reorganize this web site. Here's my plan; comments would be welcome. In particular, WordPress might not be the right tool to use going forward, but I'm not sure what else would be as easy to set up and maintain.
Overall design: the logo and "Software Carpentry" always appear at the top, along with a Javascript site menu; pages are fixed width (and all of that width is taken up with content—no sidebars); the footer contains a copyright notice and links to half a dozen pages (About, Contact, License, etc.). These footer links are redundant, since those links are in the Javascript menus as well, but this makes them more visible.
The Home Page: display a short text blurb about Software Carpentry and a 3-minute video; has a 2×2 grid, each cell of which has an icon and a line of text to take people to "About", "News", "Lessons", and "Training".
About: a longer blurb about Software Carpentry (several paragraphs), and links to three sub-pages:
- Sponsors: brief note on how to contact us to sponsor; a logo and blurb for each current sponsor; a logo and name for past sponsors.
- Contributors: brief note on how to contact us to contribute, and the kinds of contributions we want; a photo and short bio for each contributor.
- Impact (replaces "Testimonials"): pull quotes from past students, a summary of how we're assessing things now and what results we've found; links to PDFs of scholarly papers.
- Elsewhere: a list of related courses and materials (people can submit links, but they need approval before posting).
News (replaces "Blog"): our blog, but with WordPress navigation on a separate page rather than cluttering things up in a sidebar. We should also display recent mentions on Twitter somewhere.
Lessons (replaces "Lectures"): the main page is a point-form list of topic and lesson titles, each linking to the appropriate page. The page for Topic PQR has its title, a paragraph about the topic, a list of lessons (each decorated with keywords, duration, and links for downloading audio, video, HTML, PowerPoint, PDF, etc.), and comments. The page for Lesson XYZ shows the topic title (PQR) and the lesson title; the slideshow or video; some up/next/previous links; download links for audio, video, and other formats; exercises; and comments (which may be on the lesson as a whole, on particular slides, or on particular points in or ranges of video). The "Lessons" section also has:
- Reading (our annotated bibliography;
- Glossary;
- Version 4: a page showing a list of lists of links to pages of older material (the stuff we have now); and
- Version 3: a page showing a similar list of lists of links to even older material.
Training (replaces "Boot Camps"): displays a map and calendar (preferably side-by-side) and links to per-workshop pages. The page "Training ABC/Date" is for on-site training at a specific site on a specific date. The "Past Events" page is just a list of links to old training pages.
Contact: our email addresses, a link to our Twitter account, and contact info for organizers of upcoming training. (This last also appears on each workshop's page, but there's no harm duplicating it.)
License: the full text of our Creative Commons and BSD licenses.