Forums | MacLife

Yes, it does need a makeover in a big, bad way.

My bad, sorry.

Over the history of what was once the "Extension Site" I had several people helping me with it. As time went on, they left for various reasons. Nothing horrible mind you, just life has a way of getting in the way of getting in the way of projects you do for free in your spare time, you know? I appreciate everyone's help with the site and though I miss their help, I totally understand their reasons for leaving. (In short, no hard feelings!)

I put out a couple of calls for help that went largely unanswered and thus, everything started winding down with the site. I was seeing that visits to the site were dwindling and that members were going elsewhere for stats so I kind of copped a "why bother" attitude. I've had a lot of stuff going on here at home too, so finding the time to work on it regularly became less and less of a priority for me.

But now, I'm starting to get the bug again. I don't want to see the site just fade away into nothingness. I can't do it alone though, I will need help.

Ideally, what I would like to see is a whole new Team MacAddict site. This site would include:

STATS
Regular contributions of content - How To's, FAQ, etc from a variety of members.
Get away from hard-coded pages and go to a database setup so we can make the entire thing searchable and easier to update
Inclusion of other (yet to be created) MacAddict SETI-based teams

This is just stuff off of the top of my head at the moment, I'm sure there will be more.

If you are interested in helping me resuscitate the Team MacAddict site, reply here, email or PM me. Any help will be appreciated!

MM459,

I'd like to offer my (albeit somewhat amateurish) graphic design talents to you.  I redid some of the graphics for MacAddict's OS X Super Site a couple of years ago.  The buttons were recompressed by someone at the mag though and now they look terrible imho. I still have the originals on CD here though.

Anyway, if you have some ideas and want a bit of volunteer amateur graphic design, let me know...all my contact info is at the bottom.

Jeff

Why, thank you Doctor.

Here are a few things I was keeping in mind when I did the site:

That little bravenet counter at the bottom does more than just count visits. I'd get all kinds of info as to what platform the visitors used, browser, screen resolution and color depth. I know that sounds evil to some people, but it helped me out a lot when it came to designing the site because I learned that while most visitors had high-resolution screens, we still had quite a few visitors with 800x600 screens, even a few with 640x480! I used this information to guide me in designing a site that would scale nicely, no matter what resolution the viewer was using. (Change your browser window size to see what I mean.) That means keeping the graphics on the smallish size, nothing too huge.

The rollover images changed several times over the course of the site, finally settling on what we have there now. Why? I'm kind of a minimalist when it comes to design, but I wanted it to look good. Also, I try to make my sites "accessible" to those with various disabilites. That's why I have the dots that change color, and why only the page you are on has a full-time dot. It aids in navigation and even if the user is color-blind or what have you, they can still quickly determine where they are. I try to follow as many conventions as I can to make an accessable site, that would be why I include text links at the bottom and why all images have ALT tags, even if they are blank. (For users who may be using text readers to browse the web.)

That doesn't mean I'm not for a radical makeover! If you have some ideas for buttons or graphics, I'd love to see them.

I think for right now, it may be better to focus on content though. The design will get worked out once we figure out what we will have in the site and how it will be delivered. I really don't want to just put a new wrapper on same old stuff, you know?

Come on team, let's get brainstorming here! Anybody else with some ideas?

Any statisical gurus out there?