DW 26/03/22
- I have added the full date to the title of the events. They originally just had the month (eg. “Whalan Launch – April”) but with all the reschedules and delays this was too confusing.
- I added a news story for rainy day activities. Not very exciting, but wanted to keep the news flowing.
DW 14/03/22
- Great work on the galleries George.
- I have started adding the date to the launch status. It was getting really confusing with the all the cancellations and reschedules.
- Still trying to find out how we get the events to roll over in our time zone, but not a huge issue.
GK 7/3/22
- Completed 2015 Gallery
GK 4-5/3/22
- Completed 2016 Gallery
- Completed 2017 Gallery
GK 27/2/22
- Completed 2018 Gallery
GK 26/2/22
- Completed 2019 Gallery
DW 23/2/22
- Email now live.
- Contact us form now going to club email address.
- Changed Contact Us form to “dark transparent” colour scheme because the entered text was hard to read.
- Made most of the changes suggested by David C.
DW 21/2/22
Website live!
- DNS now pointing to Siteground.
- Temporary URL renamed to club URL
- New site now live and hosted by Siteground
- Waiting on change to eiligibility_type to allow transfer of domain from Nightwalker (TPP) to Siteground.
- Email sent to test if email has gone across to siteground.
GK 8/2/22
- Changed email address in footer and contact page to an image for now to stop spam. There are other ways we can obfuscate the email address in code to stop spam, but allow people to still click the link. This can be looked at in the future.
DW 8/2/22
- Fixed up the Resources menu item so that its not clickable and is consistent with the other menu items.
GK 7/2/22
- Sent off email to Robert to start the process of migrating the website domain name to the new host.
- Received reply from Robert. We now have the EPP code.
DW 07/07/22
- Removed minOrange broken link checker plugin.
- Added a note to the instructions about minimising the use of Plugins.
DW 07/02/22
Re: Names popping up on sliders. I don’t really understand the purpose of image titles. You can search and filter by filename, so I don’t know what titles do. Other than popping up when you hover. But I won’t change any other sliders until we have investigated.
- Added Estes motor tube sizes to Resources page. I have never seen this table in both metric and imperial format. So I made it. Formatting is not great because its copied from Excel. On a mobile you lose the imperial measurement columns because its too wide. Maybe a fix for later. I will add to the to do list.
- Added an image to the Documents page and added the page to the menu under Resources. At the moment Resources is still clickable. Need to decide if we are sticking with non-clickable top items – See Ryan’s comment.
DW 06/02/22
- I have made a documents page that could sit under resources. It brings together all the docs on the whole site, to make things quicker to find. http://nswrocketry.org.au/documents/ Keen to get your thoughts on this. GK: Looks great. I think this page will get used quite a bit by members/committee. Do we want to add an image, or this page is purely functional? DW: I’ll add an image to be consistent.
DW 04/02/22 & 05/02/22
- I have tried removing the titles from the Home page slider images so they don’t pop up when you hover over them. Seems to work, but CSS code that hides the names for every slider on the whole site would be a better solution. GK: We can have a look at that. For the galleries we may want to keep the name to make it easier to identify specific photos.
- Updated the website instructions with naming conventions, tagging instructions, adding events, image specifications and launch status update instructions. Thanks for that.
- Re-arranged website instructions and added formatting.
- Rearranged the Resources page to improve the layout.
- Added a CASA section to the Launch Safety page and the other docs DC requested.
- Added the resources suggested by Geoff.
- Redid the colour blocking in the launch info page, so it aligns better.
- Added links to the Launch Liability forms in the Launch Info page and the Flight Cards page.
- Made a draft Membership Form. Not live yet. Feel free to test it here. We will need to get the committee comfortable with no signature on the form.
- Made the fee table a template so we can use it on the form and the membership page.
- Added 3 new pages for the L2 tests. These are looking good.
- Installed MiniOrange Broken Link checker plugin. It seems really slow and can’t be scheduled to run automatically (or at least the free version can’t). It only found one broken link, but it was a Word Press Link not on our site. So something to upgrade later perhaps. Maybe a recommendation from Ivana.
- There is also a Word Press health check tool. Not sure what that checks but our site is healthy.
- Installed the Site Kit by Google plugin. We can use this to view traffic. Don’t know how to use it yet. Maybe we need another Ivana recommendation there.
- I have made this page order number 1 so it appears at the top of Pages.
GK: In regards to the plug-ins, I think we should limit them to only really the necessary ones we need. I can see there may be incompatibilities in the future if we upgrade to the latest version of wordpress for example, and some of the plug-ins break which may affect the entire site. It can take some time for the plug-in developers to update their plug-ins. I’ll ask Ivana about this, and how much of a problem it may or may not be.
Thanks for all the work you put in over the weekend!!
DW 03/02/22
In the events page I have:
- Updated the times
- Added photos to each event (launch rods theme)
- Added directions
Added slider to the Resources page. Rockets with fake skies theme.
DW 03/02/22
I have started building a Resources page. Its mostly just links at the moment. Would like to add more text eventually. But its a start….and is better than the current site.
Great work on all stuff below!
Talk this afternoon.
GK 3/2/22
- Imported all Newsletters and linked them on Club Newsletters page. Linked this under the News main menu.
- Add brief heading summaries for each of the news letter links to make it easier to search for things.
GK 2/2/22
- Updated menus so if there is a submenu you can’t click the menu option. I have moved that menu option down into the sub-menu. Those menu options with a single page are clickable in the menu. The breadcrumbs I think reflect the page hierarchy set up in the pages section, but I think they still work correctly.
- Updated tables in Membership and Certifications to be the same format. They both now use the Enfold table widget with the same formatting. We may need custom CSS to customize these further, though I think they are OK. I had to make it scrollable so you can see it in portrait on the phone.
- Added rest of gallery pages, and updated all gallery sub menu navigation to all other gallery pages.
- Started working on 2019 Gallery.
DW 1/2/22
- Finished the About page including the Tripoli section.
- Finished the Certifications page, expect the table needs reformatting.
- Finished the Equipment page.
- Removed the History page from the Menu.
- Updated the menu on the Membership Page.
- Removed the “New to Rocketry” button from the home page.
GK: Nice work!
I am not 100% happy with the pages listed above, but I think they are at the point that they are better than the current site. We can continue to refine them. GK They are looking good, if wording needs changing that’s something we can address with feedback from the committee.
GK 1/2/22
- Updated TODO list, and prioritised what needs to be done.
DW 31/1/22
- Good to see the events and countdowns all rolled forward after Saturday.
- I notice that you can only filter by 1 category at a time, so you can’t filter by Whalan and Gallery. One or the other. Not a big deal, but worth noting.
- How do we get news post thumbnails the same shape/size?
- Tables on the Membership and Certifications pages should be the same format. Not sure how to format tables yet.
GK 31/1/22
2021 and 2020 Galleries are now also done. Since there were only 4 launch events I have left a few more photos in each of the Galleries. I did remove around 10-15% of the photos that we had on the old site. It will take a while to get through all of them but it wasn’t too bad. I have included the photos you had sent me for the December launch.
DW 31/1/22
Great work George. Glad the 2022 galleries are all finished!!
Happy with your approach to naming and tagging.
GK 30/1/22
Added photos from 29th Jan launch to the gallery. Was practicing what needs to be done to get the photos in. I have made the images 1000px max dimension, and added the categories “Gallery” and “Whalan” to the photos when importing them. The image filenames are Whalan_20220129_xx.jpg so we can search by category and date to find exactly the ones we want.
At least the 2022 gallery is done!!!
DW 30/1/22
See what you mean about the breadcrumb title. It looks much better. I didn’t read your comment properly and thought you were talking about the breadcrumbs themselves.
DW 27/1/22
- Started updating the About page.
- Added a parachutes slider to the About page.
- I then decided we shouldn’t have parachutes in the contact us slider, so removed them and added “Light Shadow”
- Added Sparky Protocols to the Launch Safety page.
George do you have a nice Sparky motor photo anywhere? I can’t find any. Not great but it is a sparky at a club launch: http://www.nswrocketry.org.au/gallery/2019_Launches/Mullaley_2019_04_06/Images/Mullaley-April-2019-26.jpg
GK 26/1/22
Nice work on all that new content Derek! Looks good.
Today I’ve been looking at all the pages to try to give them all a consistent look. I’ve updated the formatting of the Breadcrumb page title to look like H2 style. This means we don’t have to keep adding a title to each page. The title is now automatically in the breadcrumb menu. It was there anyway but too faint. This way we also don’t waste screen realestate on duplicating the heading. Do you think this will work for us, or should we remove the title from the breadcrumb menu and include it on the page itself?
- Fixed sub-menu for Flight Info, some of the menu options weren’t linked to the new pages.
DW 25/1/22
- I think the Flight Cards page is finished. Quite simple. We can link to them elsewhere as well. GK: Looks good to me.
- Equipment is about 50% complete. Need better photos and more detailed info.
- Launch Safety is good enough for now. Just links to Tripoli docs really…and some safety tips.
- Certifications is about 50% complete.
- History page is a mess and I was sent loads of new info today. Might hide that page for go live and come back to it. Time consuming! GK: I agree this will take some time to write up properly. I would leave it until later. It isn’t critical for go live date.
- I think I will look at the About page next unless you have another suggestion. GK: I think it is important to at least have a brief description here, so a good thing to work on next.
I am putting off thinking about galleries for now. GK: Not critical at this stage.
I installed a Plugin that allows us to embed PDFs into a page. But then when I used it the results weren’t great. I think our guru would tell us that its better to link to PDFs. So that’s what I will do for now. GK: I would not try to embed PDFs I would just link to them. I think that will give us the least number of problems.
DW 21/1/22
I added member benefits bullets to the Membership page. This meant we needed to go to 3 colour block sections. Now the last section looks similar to the footer. Perhaps the footer needs to be darker so it doesn’t blend in when we have an odd number of colour blocks. GK: Footer is now darker.
Added a “New to Rocketry” button to the homepage. Doesn’t look great. But it will do for now.
GK 24/1/22
- Added Newsletter page (not linked anywhere yet) to start the process of importing those in. 2021 has a couple of Newsletters in there. I’ll list the major sections in the newsletters as well to make it easier to find things. The layout can of course be refined.
DW 24/1/22
I have added CSS to fix thumbnail borders. I know, look at me! Nice! Looks good now. 🙂
Let me know what you think. Need to lock in the gallery template before we start adding images.
Also explained CSS in the Instructions page.
GK 24/1/22
DW: New blog layout looks much better.
- Continuing to experiment with blog post layout.
- Removed some columns from the media screen so that the list of images shows up more compact. If you want more columns added back sclick on “Screen Options” in the top right, and then you can select extra fields to be shown with each image.
- Added News category for images. This is for any featured images in blog posts.
- Added instructions on how to create new blog posts.
DW 24/1/22
- I have added a link to the Tripoli logo in the footer.
Not a huge issue but I noticed that when the page is narrow you have the news at the bottom of the home page and then repeated in the footer. Might look a bit strange when we have proper news stories in there. But I think we just have to live with this. GK: I think this is fine.
DW 23/1/22
- I have started playing around with gallery layouts. Trying to come up with the most efficient way to display a lot of photos that are accessible with as few clicks as possible. Have a look and see what you think. With this layout you can view a whole year of thumbnails on a single page. With the old site there is up to 10 pages per launch! Click on the Galleries sub menu item under Launch Info. Only 2021 and 2022 will work at the moment.
- I have added new categories for Maps, Documents and Logos and categorised all those files.
- I have have deleted all the random images that weren’t categorised.
- I got the Events calendar back but the breadcrumbs are still wrong. If I make the Launch Info page the parent of the events page the content disappears.
DW 23/1/22
Fixed the breadcrumbs. You have to edit the child page and select the parent. But somehow lost the events link. Page is still there, but not linking correctly. I will try to fix.
GK 23/1/22
- Added main page slider.
- Slightly updated the footer to give a little more room to latest news, and made search box smaller to accomodate.
- Testing different kinds of blog post layouts.
- Removed secondary menu from the top of the page.
- Increased font size in membership cost table.
DW 23/1/22
Siteground is backing up the site every day around 7.00pm. I assume that is sufficient for now. There is also the option to do separate manual back-ups if we are doing major changes. GK: Good to know, thanks for checking this out.
Tags vs. Categories – Tags seem to be more wordy and you can only filter by Tags by doing a text search. Whereas Categories can be selected from a dropdown menu. So I think we should use Categories. The category hierarchy doesn’t seem to work well so I think we should create a category for each launch using the same naming convention as the file names eg. “Location_YYMMDD” : “Whalan_210626” If you agree I’ll add this to the notes. GK: This sounds good, let’s go with that.
I have:
- Removed “Footer” from the Footer menu in the socket.
- Adjusted the spacing in the footer because the email address was getting cropped. Assume this happened when we increased the font size. Footer spacing could maybe do with more work but fine for now.
- Changed the breadcrumbs to black font and increased the size to make them clearer.
- Removed Weeks from the countdown timers (Home and Launch pages) because the Seconds text was getting cropped. So its just days, hours, minutes, seconds now.
Alternatively we could remove seconds, but I think its fun to see the seconds ticking down. - Added descriptions to all the Categories including required aspect ratios. Can you please add an aspect ratio for the main page slider when you have set it up.
- Made a narrower logo, so its less likely to overlap with the menu.
DW 22/1/22
I found the logo text hard to read. So I made a new wider logo with the club name to the right. Possibly too big now, but at least its clearer.
GK 22/1/22
- Recomendation was to change the sliders to fade rather than slide as it tends to give people motion sickness. I think the sliding from the side was also drawing more attention to the images and away from the content. The fade I believe is less jarring. DW: Agree. Fade looks better.
- I have removed the bread crumb menu from the main page only as it really is not needed there. The recomendation was also to include a long narrow full width slide show on the main page between the menu and the first info block. This makes the landing page a lot more attractive. We can choose perhaps 5 images that will cycle there. I will give this a go today. DW: Good idea.
- Updated the contact page to include an icon list with email and facebook. DW: Love those icons. They would look good in the footer as well, but don’t think they are available as a footer widget.
- Updated the formatting of the News (blog) feed on the main page. DW: Looks better.
- Updated the footer layout a little bit. My sister said we can create the footer as a page which will give us much more control over the layout and contents, over using the default footer with widgets. DW: Good idea. Then we can include the icons.
- Added simple captcha to the form. My sister again said that without it we would end up with a lot of spam. DW: Good idea.
DW 22/1/22
I have renamed the blog News. Blog seems like a 1990s thing. And we aren’t blogging. Haha … Yup makes sense.
DW 21/1/22
A have thrown everything into the footer. I thought it would be good to have it all there, then we can decide what to keep after our chat tomorrow. Cool, I’ll be talking to my sister today, so I’ll also get her to give us some recommendations about what should go in the footer.
I have added a secondary menu at the top and 2 menus in the footer (left side and next to copyright). As with the footer just exploring our options. I don’t think we really need the extra menu at the top. I think it uses up some screen realestate when the main menu already does a similar job. We already have the breadcrumbs menu underneath the main one. DW: Agree I have removed it. But we need to get the breadcrumbs working.
Added small separators between the main menu items. Its recommended when you have menu items that are more than single word….for clarity. Nice, definitely looks better.
Slider animation is a bit annoying on a mobile phone. It looks too big. There is an option to hide it, but then it hides it on a computer as well. Not a big issue. There could be custom code we can write to conrol this on mobile, but I think it is fine for now. DW: Agree not a priority.
Very good choice of images on the different sliders. They look a lot better.
GK: 21/1/22
- Updated favicon icon to have a transparent background. Nice
- Added website development instructions page. So that we or anyone else doing updates to the website know what the procedure is. Still needs to have lots of the instructions added. Love it. I added a section for image specifications. Needs work but a started with the aspect ratios for all the sliders.
DW: 21/1/22
I have played around with the images in the sliders. Conclusion: The images in a slider need to all be the same aspect ratio. While you can make different size images work on a computer (by using spacing) it doesn’t translate well on a mobile device.
GK: Agreed, the images should all be the same size. I think we can just have dedicated images for the specific image sliders on the different pages. Even if they are duplicated in the galleries. The galleries will have what ever the original size is. From time to time we can manually add extra slider images if we want to refresh the look.
I think sliders can be a bit distracting if they have too many images, so maybe we agree on 6 images per slide. Pick the very best images to suit the page and then crop them all to the same aspect ratio. I have cropped and categorized some images for the Membership Page Slider and Launch Page Slider. Went for a wider aspect ratio for the Launch Page to mix it up a bit.
GK: Perfect looks good.
Love the TODO list. Time to focus.
DW: 20/1/22
I have added the Media Assistant plugin and created some Media categories. I then used the category to select some Crowd photos to go into a new slider on the Membership page. This worked well, but it doesn’t update automatically when new “Crowd” photos are added. So if we want the slider to include the latest Crowd photos we would need to go in an select the new Crowd photos. Not a huge issue. We could do this every few months to keep things fresh.
The issue with the Membership slider is the photos are different sizes. So we may need to duplicate the photos and then crop one version to the same size. We could then add another category called Membership Slider Cropped, which is specific for that Slider. Similar to the cropping you did for the Contact US page slider. In the Membership page there si space under the slider so the different image sizes don’t matter. But I also added a slider to the Launch Info page without space below and the Footer now jumps up and down.
So we either have space below our sliders or we crop photos to a specific size for each slider.
GK: 20/1/22
- Minor tweaks to main page, playing around with layout. Adding “Status” under the countdown title. This is where we can update it to cancelled and a reason. DW: Good idea. Needs a green/red background but we will worry about that when we do all the formatting.
- Removed the extra spacing between letters in the heading titles.
- I will need to look deeper into how to format the blog entries, so they show up as a list with the images off to the side.
- I think we should visit the footer layout next, as at the moment things are a little out of alignment. DW: Agree: It looks a mess and we need to think about the content of the footer more carefully.
- We may want to look at: https://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/how-to-tag-images-in-wordpress-with-wordpress-media-tagger/ for tagging images. DW: That sounds like a good start. 2 things I’d like to understand:
- Can you bulk tag images when you upload? eg. Tag all these with January 2021 & Whalan.
- Can you automatically included images in sliders or galleries based on their tags?
I’ll do some more reading about tags and plugins.
DW 19/1/22
I have:
- Simplified the launch page so it just shows the next Whalan and Mullaley launch. GK: Yup looks better.
- Then linked to the calendar, which is it’s own submenu page. GK: That’s good. The user can change the calendar view there to show it how they want.
- Added the colour block to the membership page. Only 2 sections, but added for consistency.
- I have added a column for Outstanding Questions/Issues in this page.
- Fixed up the venue addresses so the maps work better in the calendar. GK: Cool!
GK 19/1/22
I sat with my sister and we went through a whole bunch of different things:
DW: Awesome input George. A big thank you to your sister (and you).
- She suggested that using the classic editor is better with this theme, the other editor has some quirks with it. We switched the editor to the classic. But it is easy to switch back through Enfold > Theme Options > Select Your Editor. DW: I can see Classic Editor is now selected in my Enfold theme. Not sure how this works with the Advanced Editor but it seems to be working.
- We removed some of the other themes that came as default with wordpress. She said simply having those themes there can pose a security risk. We are only using the Enfold theme. DW: Awesome.
- We added custom CSS to prevent Headings from automatically capitalizing text. Apparently it is not good practice and harder to read. If we want something in capitals, we can always write it out as capitals. DW: Great, those capitals were annoying.
- We added custom CSS to prevent the white link highlight over images like you would have seen in the footer when hovering over the tripoli logo. DW: Wasn’t sure what that was. Glad its gone!
- She explained how colour blocks are a better way to break up content on a page. We did this on the launch info page, and I think it looks a lot cleaner. We can choose what colours those blocks are later. We changed the background colour to white for the website, so that we can then use the colour blocks to highlight different sections. This also eliminates the need for using horizontal lines to break up a page. DW: Love it. Much better. But I have use blank separators to make some space within a section on the Launch page. Hope that is okay.
- We updated the date format and timezone. DW: Great.
- We added a blog so that we can post updates. These will be useful for things like “New launch photos” announcements, or new items on the website etc. Kind of like what we had on the right hand side of the old site. But because this is a blog, there are many ways to customize it. At the moment it is just at the bottom of the main page. We can find where we want to put this and its style later. DW: Sounds good.
- We updated the menus, so they can be easily customized and submenus added to them. Previously all pages were automatically added to the menu. This way we can decide which pages are on the menu. I have made the formatting page a submenu of the Dev and comments page. The menu content can be edited in Appearance > Menus. We can add what ever pages we want, and also by dragging them to the right a little, they become submenus. DW: Great. I had been exploring that but hadn’t got very far.
- She also said that we really shouldn’t enable comments on the website as it usually ends up with spam and we could be held responsible for what conent people post there. DW: Agree. Disabled comments is good. This aint Facebook!
DW 19/1/22
This page for the events calendar allows you to go back and see previous events. There is a button on the bottom left http://nswrocketry.org.au/events/
But I don’t know if we can embed this calender in a page….or it has to be a standalone page.
DW 18/1/22
I have made bold text a brighter blue so that its easier for us to see replies in this page. This will obviously change when we finalise the theme.
GK 18/1/22
I’ve been looking through/learning wordpress/enfold settings how to do various things.
Some thoughts on recent changes:
- It is difficult to read wide paragraphs that span the entire page. It is always preferable to have that information in multiple columns. Like you did for the launch info. DW: Agree. Lets aim for 2 column on most pages.
- I would put the information on the Membership in 2 columns as well. DW: Agree. Will do.
- On the main page I would put the next launch information above the video. That is one of the most important bits of information members look for. DW: Agree. Done. Have we thought about how we handle a cancelled launch? So the night before when the count down is still going – how do we show that the event although scheduled is no longer taking place. We should also provide an explanation why it was cancelled, and potentially when it may be re-scheduled. DW: Text box added on the top right of the Home page for now. Need to give this more thought. We have no way of showing previous launch dates or cancelled launch dates at the moment. Perhaps we just use the “Upcoming Events” function for the next event and then show a list of launches for the whole year.
- On the launch info page we should have the event we are counting down to highlighted (or repeated next to the counter) just like we have on the main page. DW: Agree. I have repeated it next to the counter.
- I would rename the headings: “Whalan Launch Site Info” to just “Whalan Launch Site” and same for Mullaley “Mullaley Launch Site” DW: Agree. Done.
- I think eventually we may want to bring back the sidebar, but let’s do that only when we need it. DW: Agree.
- I tried the contact form the other day, but could not see where the information ended up. Does it get emailed to you? I know from experience you may end up with quite a bit of spam because bots can fill that info and send it. We’ll have to monitor it when it goes live. DW: It should go to you and I at the moment. I just found my test in my junk folder. Did you send a message from a made up email address?
- I have been compiling a list of questions for my sister, and hopefully she’ll be able to answer those tomorrow. DW: Awesome. Please thank your sister for me. Appreciate her input.
DW 18/1/22
I have:
- Disabled the side bar for now as it wasn’t adding any value. Happy to reinstate it if we can think of useful content to go in there. It may be useful when we have 2nd level pages.
- Experimenting with a 2 column layout for the Launch Info page. I have kept the old single column layout below the 2 column version in case we want to revert back. I think 2 columns works well without the sidebar. May be too narrow with the sidebar.
- Fixed up some of the Launch text and added an acknowledgement of the traditional land owners. Didn’t seem right to thank the current owners and the not the traditional owners.
- Played around with the footer again, but still not right.
DW 17/1/22
I have:
- Added a Formating Samples page so we can see how different text will appear. May be useful when we start creating a colour scheme.
- Started adding text to the membership page.
GK 17/1/22
- Fixed the maps link so it opens in a new tab.
DW – Thanks for fixing those links. I saw how you did it and used the same approach for the Tripoli logo in the footer.
In regards to the colour formatting I would still leave that for now, it is something that is very easy to tweak later. As long as we are consistent with using Heading 1, 2, 3 etc at the same levels, then it will be automatically adjusted for everything. The same goes for bold text.
Also nice work on the updates. 🙂
I wouldn’t link the competitions to a specific launch event, as they can span multiple launches and some span the entire year, and the competitions usually have had their own page with details of rules and prizes. We may also eventually publish the results of those competitions, and people may want to go back and have a look at those. (competition stuff can be added to the phase II list)
Perhaps keep the time dependant launch / open day / AGM events together, and then just have a special anouncements section that has “items” not specifically linked to a time and place. This may be anouncements like “Please renew your memberships”, “Altitude competition”, “volunteers needed” etc.
DW – Agree. Sounds like a good approach.
DW 16/1/22
I have:
- Replaced the logos with 200 pixel wide versions. The old larger versions are still stored in Media in case we need them.
- Updated the text on the home page.
- Replaced the satellite images and maps on the Launch page with clearer more up to date versions.
- Re-written and re-organised a lot of the launch text, so that it is clearer.
- Added sections for Mullaley accommodation and a thank you to the land owners.
For the maps of the launch sites it would be good if we could have a Google maps window instead of an image. But it looks like you have to pay for Google APIs now. I have included links to the Google maps grid reference for now. Unfortunately they don’t open in a new tab. Any idea how to fix this?
I don’t like the fact that bold text is blue and looks like a link (see home page). We need to think about the colour scheme. Perhaps we could create a scheme using the blue and red from the logo.
GK – 15/1/22
Where do you think we should put special announcements? These include things like AGM notification, or competition announcements, or special events like open days. I think they should go somewhere on the main page.
DW – So far I have created 4 Event Categories – Whalan, Mullaley, AGM and Special.
I suggest on the home page we show the next launch, AGM and Special event. Most of the time that means we will just show the next launch. Maximum would be 3 events (one of each type).
On the launch page we are showing the next 6 Whalan and the next 1 Mullaley.
Competitions are normally linked to a launch, so I suggest we either include it in the launch title or the description
eg. Whalan Launch Day – January 2022 (including duration competition)
On the
DW – 15 Jan
Whalan and Mullaley headings don’t line up on a mobile device. GK – I’ve fixed this by making the events children of each of the headings. They should now show properly on mobile.
DW: Awesome looks great on my mobile.
DW – 14th January (again)
Agree. I may have got carried away.
Perhaps we start with simple versions of:
- Home
- Launch Info
- Membership
- Contact Us
For the media ideally we want to tag all photos with:
- Location (Whalan, Mullaley, Doonside etc.)
- Year
- Month
- Favourite/Best of tag
Then we can make dynamic galleries based on the tags. Not sure if that’s possible in the default gallery, may need a plugin.
GK- 14th January:
I think we should have a phased approach to the development. In Phase I we should first focus on the smallest set of pages to provide all the important information to members and the public. Make it all consistent and establish format and naming conventions. This would get the website up and running in a useable form. This would include menus only to the relevant information.
Having that initial minimal set of pages makes it easy to change the layout and formatting without having to do a lot of updates to all the pages. Once we and the committee are happy with it, we can then move to the next phase.
We could also potentially go live at this point.
In phase II we would start adding all the extra nice to have pages, galleries, etc. And at this point perhaps bring in more people to help add extra content.
We can start putting together a list of what we would want in each of the phases.
We should also standardize image name conventions to make them easy to find in the Media folder.
Because this is a website, we should also optimize image sizes. I noticed the NSWRA logos are quite big. I think we should shrink these to make them faster to load.
DW – 14th January:
Changed colour scheme to Blue-Grey. Not sure if that’s the best one. Most colour schemes have a footer that’s too dark for Tripoli logo.
I started playing around with the menu structure. Header menu is starting to take shape with top level pages and then some second level pages (eg. under Launch Info). Just not sure if users will realise they can click on the top level page, not just the second level drop down pages. Top level page will contain the most important info. Tripoli website has top level menu items that can’t be clicked. The top of the dropdown list is usually an overview page. Perhaps we should adopt this structure.
Side bar and footer menu is not working for pages that are top level only – wrong order and no indentations. But not sure if we need both of these menus yet.
The “you are here” text is too small.
Tripoli logo in the foot currently opens Tripoli page in the same window. Would be good to include the Tripoli logo in the header, but don’t know how to do that yet.
Started adding events. I think we just need a list. No point showing a calendar with only one event per month. Homepage as next launch. Launch page will have a full list.
TODO:
- Domain needs to be transferred to Siteground. Currently stuck with Nightwalker (TPP) because eligibility_type is Association and Siteground’s registrar won’t accept a .org.au domain from an Association. Need to change to Club or Non-profit before we can transfer. Inquiry with Robert of Nightwalker.
Later:
- Remove pop up filenames from slider images using CSS code.
- Resize slider on the About page. Its too big.
- Fix BT tube size table in Resources so that it works on a mobile device.
- Add a privacy statement.
- Update logo on main menu to have transparent background rather than white. You can see the outline of the image if there are darker sections under the menu. The menu is slightly transparent.
- Fix spacing of the Event “Add to calendar” buttons.
- Fix Event Calendar Breadcrumbs – Curently Home/Events/Events
- Build launch status widget that can be used on both the Home and Launch pages. Include automatic red and green text. (currently have a manual workaround)
- Complete NSWRA History page, and link it to the menus
Done:
- We need a better membership form. Fillable PDF online perhaps. But not a priority. Derek checking process with DC.
- Complete Website Dev Instructions page
- Add all newsletters and update Newsletters page
- Add Recources page including “New To Rocketry” and button on Home page.
- Make tables on the website same format.
- Decide if we want top level menu items to be clickable or just use sub menu items. https://qodeinteractive.com/magazine/how-to-create-wordpress-menu-items-without-link/
- Finish Club Equipment Page – Rail sizes and Wilson Description
- Finish Certifications Page – MPR and HPR sections
- Finish About Page – Add Tripoli section
- Update secondary menu on Membership Page – Remove unlinked options
- Unlink NSWRA History from the menu. This will be added once the History page is done.
- Remove the “New To Rocketry” button on the main page. We will put this button back when we have the section
- Decide on asset naming tag scheme – images, documents etc.
- Reduce/remove borders and spacing around thumbnails in galleries to make it more mobile friendly. Guess we need CSS.
- Fix formatting on Blog posts.
- Fix breadcrumbs.
- Select/Crop images for slide show on Membership page
- Decide on content for footer
- Format footer with agreed elements
- Decide on website colour scheme
Outstanding Questions/Issues
2. Need to agree sizing and naming conventions for images. GK: Probably best talk about this over zoom, we definitely need to standardize this soon before we have too many assets.
5. In the Whalan Venue (Events>Venues>Whalan Reserve) I have added a description of how to get to the launch site. It doesn’t feed through the Whalan events in the Calendar. GK: We’ll need to investigate
6. The “You are here” line (breadcrumbs) doesn’t work for submenu items. It misses out the first level menu item and assumes all pages are sitting in home. It should be most useful for sub menu items.
Resolved Questions/Issues
1. Is there a way to tag images that will allow us to filter them? Tags could include Whalan, Mullaley, Crowd, Parachute, Cato, Loading Rail etc. We could then use these tags to create dynamic galleries or dynamic sliders. Eg. On Membership page we have a slider that shows crowd photos.
3. Is contact us page working correctly? GK: I did receive the email notification.
4. We have decided not to use Separators between sections. Is it okay to include White Space Separators within sections? GK: I think we can include them if they serve a purpose.
New Tripoli Record!
New Jolly Logic Altimeters and Chute Release