Thanks, Jeff! Getting carried away when doing volunteer work is generally okay, lol. The changes look largely for the better!
I’m copying this response to the Activists list so others can check out the new and old versions and offer any suggestions or feedback, of which I do have a few. Starting at the top…
I’m glad to see the de-pixelized version of our old Golden Gate Bridge logo back on the site, as I kind of prefer it to the depth-perspective one Nick designed (no offense Nick), though his does come closer to the actual color of the Golden Gate Bridge and could be good somewhere the text accompanying it is similarly angled. Would it be difficult for you to copy the color of the bridge in that logo to the de-pixelized version of the old logo you worked on?
I like the gold lettering for “Libertarian Party” in the banner, but think I slightly prefer having the “of San Francisco” in a different color and slightly smaller as it was previously. Perhaps the same orange color as the bridge in the logo, if that’s updated?
Having one set of menu options across the top instead of one on top and a couple more down the side that won’t show up on phones is a big improvement. I’m not keen on “Options for Activism” as a header title though – it sounds a bit obscure, and donating and becoming a member aren’t exactly what most people think of as “activism”, although broadly speaking one could make the argument that they fall under that heading. (I realize this name carried over from the even more obscure “Activist Options” in the old sidebar and not something you added from scratch.)
As a replacement header I’d suggest “What Can I Do?”, with the “Donate” and “Become A Member” pages still appearing under that tab (though I suggest we lose the star on the latter; nothing else in the pull-down tabs has a star, and I’d rather not give membership special billing – as I noted at Saturday’s meeting, we clearly need activism more than money right now).
The third item under that tab (or the first one, in the order they’re listed) I would suggest retitling “Suggestions for Activism”. The word “Suggestions” by itself as it’s currently listed may lead people to think we’re asking for their suggestions – although come to think of it, a text box at the bottom of that page where people can suggest their ideas for activism could be a useful addition.
While we’re on menu tab headers, I’d also suggest changing “About Us” to “About the LPSF”. This will introduce people to the acronym we commonly use for “Libertarian Party of San Francisco” near the top of the page, while we’d still have the “Connect With Us” pull-down tab nearby to give the headers a warmer, more personal feel.
One thing I notice on both the previous and current versions of the website is that the beautiful photo of the city in the background is almost completely covered by the other elements on the page, so that you can hardly even tell it is a photo let alone see what it is. The upper portion of it happens to be sky; I would suggest we use that sky as background for the banner elements at the top of the page (logo, party name, and a floating rectangle below them containing the pull-down menu tabs) – I think the gold and orange would look better on sky blue than on white.
Another idea on making the background photo a little more visible would be to divide the “News” part of the front page with the articles on it from the meeting and upcoming events section, to make them two separate columns with some photo showing through in between (and maybe a bit more around the edges too. Not sure whether this might screw up how it appears on phones though…
If it’s not possible to make the main page two separate columns without causing problems with how the page appears on mobile devices, it strikes me that the “Upcoming Events” section could be condensed, especially since we don’t have any upcoming events except meetings at this time. Info for our next upcoming meeting could appear as a header across the top of a single column, and under or next to it, a link to the calendar (“See Calendar for more upcoming events!”), followed by the blog posts.
I like “Serf City Blog” as a possible name for our blog, by the way – what do others think? I envision a small logo with the words in the upper left corner, maybe in a font like the one used for the word “Surf” in the attached image below, possibly along with a small graphic. An idea for a graphic: A City Hall dome with big feet, treading on a bunch of tiny people. 
Maybe a palm tree… The Manhattan LP is already using the name (https://serfcity.wordpress.com/), but I don’t think they’d mind, and SF is more of a surf town anyway. Though in terms of being a “serf town” it might be harder to say which place is worse… 
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))
···
On Dec 13, 2020, at 8:09 PM, Jeffrey Yunes wrote:
Hi Starchild and Nick,
I got a little carried away today updating the website. I was just going to re-order a link or two, but I ended up making a bunch of changes.
I think a visitor would be uncertain about what actions we wanted them to do on the website. There was a main menu at the top, an “important” menu on the side, a “navigation” menu on the side, and a mailing list subscription box on the side.
The top menu bar had items like “meetings” which would point to our minutes archive. And our very important page “issues” was linked from the “navigation” menu, which disappeared on a mobile device!
While the changes aren’t done, I tried to move in the direction of some of the things we talked about yesterday. We now have a unified menu with simple items/categories. “Issues” is first, followed by “Connect with Us”, “Options for Activism”, and “About Us”. All the stuff about us, like our meeting minutes, contact info, bylaws, and our login page was moved under the menu item “about us.”
In believe it’s looks much simpler, but people can more easily see how they can “learn” about us or “donate / volunteer.” (Oh, we should probably update our categories to reflect those two things!)
A few other changes were made also, including updating the logo and minor changes to the about page (moving mission statement up).
If you want to compare, the original site is at:
Libertarian Party of San Francisco |
and the new update site is of course at:
Life & Liberty,
Jeff
