Design and Layout Suggestions

[zourtney]

Ok, so there has been a little talk around about how we need some more content and/or to cut back a little on the subdomain setup. I don't mind stripping things down a bit, but I need some suggestions.

What would be even more beneficial is, of course, content. I'm thinking of putting up a little deely on how we re-routed the wiring in the back of the Blazer last weekend. Ideally, we would write up stuff like that, then spend our lives on Chevy forums saying how we did things. People like that sort of stuff.

[zourtney]

I'm not sure how much I like this board. It's ok...maybe it just needs skinned a little. I know forums are always a bit isolated from the main site, but it'd be nice to do something to make this "look Randomland."

[Nick]

The whole site need to look more "randomland." Its all kinda vanilla and default.

[Nick]

Siphon some of their traffic to our site? Sounds like a good idea, and I like their site so if we help some of them all the better. I ran more wires yesterday and installed a switch to control the power watts invertanator. I also welded a real basic mount for the inverter and screwed it to the floor in the back. Right behind the passenger side wheel-well. Now one can control the power from the drivers seat. I took lots of pictures with the intent on making a basic guide to do-it-yo-self wiring and the sort.

I still like the idea that one of us had before. The one about having small sections for all the admins 'rides' and the stories behind them. Brad should do one for his mustang though.....not the honda. That page would go along the lines of "I bought it, my wife got mad because I wanted a manual, it gets 450 miles a tank"

So yeah.

[Nick]

Also. The forum and gallery site need links to the other/main site(s). More ties to the rest of the site, more complete package. Randomland...the experience...the life style.

[zourtney]

ok... I might be ready to concede. Randomland is currently way too spread out for the small amount of content we do have. I like the separation, personally, but I'm thinking searching the site for anything is too impossible.

I guess we could try to find some sort of Google searcher that will dig into the subdomains, but I don't know. What's the best solution?

[zourtney]

Get out the beat sticks! We NEED to redesign out site to look less like canned WordPress. I might even be willing to give up my stipulation of wanting variable width pages. We just need to do SOMEthing.

[zourtney]

Like the expansive mass of nothingness they call the "Great White North," so is our Randomland.

Look thee hither! Look thee thither! What impresses upon thee therewithin this land we proclaim to be "Random?"

Nothing. Let's smash the site back together. Set up categories where we have subdomains. And map subdomains the the categories

ie:
motors.randomland.net --> randomland.net/motors, where "motors" is a WordPress category

We can make the theme smart enough to load different banners based on the current category. Easy enough. Better Googleable.

*Sigh*

[zourtney]

Man! How is the Randomnets get so awesomed?!

Well, ok, it's a little different now, but not good. We need to:

• Get back unique banners for each section
• Change search box to search all subdomains (maybe make a radio button to give you the option)
• Get a non-crappy theme (each of my attempts ends up bland)

[zourtney]

Grumble, grumble on behalf of the Wordpress. I'm sick of trying to slap together plugins to make WordPress do what we want. Yes, it is decent for content management, plugin support, and news. And will save us from reinventing some wheels. But we need to attack it differently.

Blog-style doesn't appeal to me. I'm thinking we should see if we can statically create the site structure we want. Then we just write the code to load the content. Easy and straightforward.

Sooooo...if that approach works, we could do something like this:
/index.php: front page. Load latest news, but also make it look inviting. And not like someone's 10 second WordPress site.
/motors/index.php: set as a subdomain on GoDadday and make an actual page for motors. Make it load motors related news by filtering a WordPress category "motornews" or something
/motors/francine/index.php: create a Francine folder. Make an index.php file which loads a stored WordPress page "Francine Stories"
/motors/francine/cc-part-1/index.php: create a folder for each stored WordPress page, with index.php file that loads the page

The problem I foresee is wordpress's url rewrite junk not letting us traverse the directory structure in this way...

[Nick]

I agree that the wordpress stuff is not working quite like we would like. I would say we should go for writing our own backend if it was not for the need to make: a comment system, a user system, a posting system, a login/admin system, navigation, and working with the forums and gallery. We wrote all that once.... but it was far from mature. What are the probabilities of a custom wordpress plugin or a different set of site management tools?

[zourtney]

Another set of content management tools might be a good idea. Exporting/importing the content would be trivial (except for image links, but I hate how they're set up now anyway).

What IS good about WordPress is that it has a lot of search-engine and anti-spam stuff already written. I know I made that one dorky submit-us-a-response form with email verification and it got spam in no time. And that wasn't a known, existing system.

Point being -- I don't want to write anti-spammer code. A million people already have. It's boring, frustrating, and wouldn't work as well as what's already there.

We used to make our own pages and links. We can do that again, if we must. But WordPress does have some decent (better than Notepad) authoring tools. I'd like to keep that.

[Nick]

So stick with word press it is. I will try to find a way to make it more a site with content areas and less a broken blog when l have some free time. :-)

[Nick]

Yes. We do need to do something. It is agreed that we ditch wordpress? Does brad have any input on the toppic? (I know he never visits the forums or the site so Courtney will just have to use one of those beat-sticks next time he seems him) And if we do go with the other CMS, what shall we do to the default theme before going with it? I have been playing with the thing as time allows, but going is slow as I am unfamiliar with it (and Linux keeps eating my dsl connection. Though, that has been up for about 5 hours now with no drops)

[zourtney]

I say ditch it. We just need to be sure we export all of our pages. I know there is some "content" that never even got imported anyway.

I have been working on gallery-type stuff. I don't really want to write an entire gallery system, but I am. And then we can have control again!