Team,
Thanks to help from several individuals, a relaunch of the Agile Austin website is now in Beta. First, I must thank Jay Paulsen for providing the spark that really inspired this project to get started as well as some technical support; Dan Corbin for joining me on a hackathon event and putting in extra effort to get the site off the ground; Scott Killen for providing me some content; David Hetherington for helping to contribute ideas; and many more people on this email distribution who helped provide content, images, and listened to me drone on about this project.
Now, on to the meat of this message. The new Agile Austin website is in Beta and I invite everyone reading this message to please review it at
http://new.agileaustin.org.
Disclaimers:
1) I know the slider images on the front page look horrible. I'm working on finding a graphics artist to help me with that.
2) Aesthetics may look horrible, but I have yet to tweak very many colors from the default of the WordPress theme used for this site.
3) I'm having file upload issues and some of the files on the downloads page are not actually available for download.
4) The content is only current as of my last port of data back in January. I will update the data next week. Walter has also said that he would help look into diagnosing why postevent isn't automagically posting new information.
With the disclaimers out of the way, I'd like to highlight some of the features of the new site:
1) We have dropdown menus that will help organize information better.
2) Sliders on the home page will provide some pizazz, and are currently used to help elevate attention given to sponsors. (They were all listed below the fold on the old home page).
3) We can now set alerts....like register for the conference...or elections are coming up.
4) Content boxes on the home page can now be fixed to items we want to have a long life...like the conference or the next monthly meeting.
5) Social media integration. Links to our social media sites are displayed several places on the site and the footer lists our latest Facebook posts and Twitter tweets.
6) We have FAQs.
7) Each program has it's own page complete with information about it, and a mini roll of its latest posts.
8) Downloads are broken down by program/category so that it's easier to find things if you are browsing.
9) Check out the gallery. I thought that this would be a good way to highlight the success and energy of our past events.
10) Blogs. This is tentative pending when I receive blog entries from people I've solicited, but I've reserved space on the menu bar for a link to a blog page. My hope is that the organization of this new site helps us further let the community drive our content and knowledge base.
Again, while I am still working on the disclaimer items mentioned above, there is enough content there to show the organization and function of the site. Please review this and provide me with any corrections and suggestions you have. Of course, feel free to ask any questions.
One last note, if I have not solicited you for a blog entry yet for the site, it's because I made a long list, and I just haven't finished emailing everyone yet. So, in that light, I would greatly appreciate it if you would take a few moments and write a blog entry that we could post to the site. I'm hoping that as more people contribute, the more interest and content it will draw. It will also help make our site into a knowledge base for our community, and a shining star of Agile information.
Thanks.
Your friendly neighborhood Tech Chair.
