Website Plans: Facilities
Website Plans
Contents
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Overview – The starting point for documentation about our plans for the website.
- Introduction
- Terminology
- Document structure
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Strategy – Details of our strategy for developing the website.
- Evolution over revolution
- IT and joined-up data
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Your input – We want your help. This is your website; we value your ideas and feedback.
- What are we looking for?
- How to send us your ideas.
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Schedule – When things are going to happen. Time scales, as far as we are able to estimate them.
- Road map
- Time line
- Tasks list
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Participation – A website where you get to take part, rather than passively absorb information, will be more fun and productive. We have plans to make this happen.
- Communication
- Members-only areas
- Interaction
- Contribution
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Facilities – Plans for the website in terms of functionality, useful tools and other applications.
- Social media integration
- Directory of writing groups
- On-line competitions
- Link magazine
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Features – Plans for the behavioural and technical aspects of the site.
- Privacy & security
- People database
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Articles & editing
- Temporal content
- Markdown for content
- Automatic TOC generation
- PayPal integration
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Content – Plans for what articles, pages and other information to have on the site. Examples: news, information, events, competitions, products and services.
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Material
- Revamp "who is NAWG?" area
- Organisation
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Presentation – Plans for improvements and additions to the way the site appears, e.g. its layout, styling and navigation.
- Layout
- Style
- Navigation
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Management – Plans to improve the operational aspects of the site, i.e. the way it's run and maintained, and the way we respond to communications.
- Operations & procedures
- Who does what?
Some of the above titles are hyperlinks.
Click for more detailed documentation.
More will become links as things evolve.
What do we mean by facilities? The short answer is lots of useful things, but it basically boils down to software on the website that provides useful functions to our users.
This document sets out some of our plans in this area.
Social Media Integration
Social media are so popular now that it makes sense to use it to help connect people with an interest in writing.
More complex integrations are possible, but the first "quick win" step is probably to introduce the following widgets that can be applied to any article:
- "Like us on facebook" buttons.
- "Follow us on twitter" buttons.
- Similar one-click tricks for other social media?
Directory of Writers' Groups
Lots more to do with this directory. Here are some possibilities:
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Improve the searching for groups:
- Find groups by their title, contact name, e-mail address, etc.
- Find groups within a given distance from your postcode.
- Include data for individual members, as well as groups.
Competitions
Running a competition completely on-line has many benefits, especially as it cuts down the amount of work for the NAWG staff!
Here are some plans with regard to competition-related facilities:
- Put the "100" competition fully on-line.
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Create a central database for all competition details and results. This will give the following advantages:
- Competition information pages can be more automated.
- Competition information pages will have a consistent look and feel.
- Reduced risk of errors, by avoiding duplicated information.
- Automatic handling of competition's statuses, based on closing dates.
Link Magazine
Link magazine is available in paper form and on-line as a downloadable document. At present, the processes for producing and managing this are not very well connected. We plan to address this.
In particular:
- Source paper copies and downloadable documents from a central repository.
- Develop a facility to read Link on-screen, rather than downloading it.
- Provide the most recent electronic copies to members and earlier issues for the general public.