drupal

Today we signed the contract for web development of our new site! The site will be built by Ciplex, LA's premiere web design firm. They are coming on board as partial sponsors of the project, giving a deep discount to make the new site something we can build within our budget.

Got some great feedback on the new home page design, and then made some more improvements. 

Here's the latest design for our new home page:

Summary of changes:

• main content area has been broken apart to feel less overwhelming.
• Intro video player is bigger.
• eliminated the "enter credit name" field (too confusing from user POV).
• added member sign in box to right column.
• crisper copy.
• dynamic blocks on bottom to display latest production blogs and featured videos.
• Action Blocks moved down to be consistent site-wide.

If you have any design notes, please let me know!

Hey everyone,

So, this is a big update regarding our web development.

A few days ago I put the finishing touches on our site specs, and reached out to Drupal developers to put a bid on our job. The response so far has been great, and we have a lot of interested developers. 

I posted the job on the Drupal forums here: http://drupal.org/node/275024

There are links in the job posting to several of the design mock-ups i've been working on.

Here is a little preview...(click for larger images)

new home page:

Tonight I'm headed to a Drupal meetup for LA developers. I'm exploring options for deploying the next generation of our site. Looking for reliable developers to get bids.

The whole tech scene is changing so fast. Today I read that Facebook might be going Open Source to keep up with Open Social. I'm not sure what all this will mean in the long term. 

As our site moves more toward a social-platform in anticipation of the needs of the Collaboration Foundation, we have been looking to Drupal to give us an open and affordable way to provide many common social features. Drupal has always been one or two steps behind in terms of meeting these needs, although it has been getting better- hence one of the motivations for upgrading our site to a newer version of Drupal. 

Watched this TED Talk video last night. Really enjoyed it: Howard Reinghold discusses down the evolution of collective action, as new forms of working together encroach on competitive survival of the fittest models.

today i talked with jason about the design and functionality of our website upgrade.

it's going to be a major improvement, but also, a lot of work. pretty much the whole website is going to be retooled while we move up from Drupal version 4.7 to Drupal version 5.0.

Once completed, it will be a lot easier to manage this project and allow everyone to participate more. it will also create a solid step toward the Collaboration Foundation, which is exciting.

uploading videos, photos, etc. will be much more powerful, as will the ability to join and organize groups. We will also be displaying project info on your profiles, so that they will be more functional tools for keeping up with the production. There are also a couple of fundamental changes designed to open this project up even more, while also keeping track of participation.

this weekend i finished putting together the first pass of functionality and features for the next version of our website. the next step is to budget the site and figure out how much it's going to cost to drupalize.

i'm gonna call it an early night. it's almost 2am, i've been pulling several late nighters this week- usually up til 4 or 5am. fueled by a stream of ideas that keep me up. i like this sort of stuff. it's a part of the process i really enjoy, where the idea gets refined and reveals new solutions to its own challenges.

also, we posted a couple of new videos. here is a moment from our Road Trip, part of a "perfect moment" series we are starting:

i've been having web based brainstorms.

in planning for the next web upgrade, as well as the development of the collaboration foundation site, i've been sketching out plans that simplify the entire flow for this site, add a lot of community features that will improve the ability for everyone to communicate and partiipate, etc.

the last 3 days i've been in intensive design mode: photoshoping mockups, and making notes on napkins about features and how the site should work. during this process, i've had a few new ideas that feel like breakthroughs for moving this project forward. i'm actually really excited about implementing them, which gets me excited about web development again, even though it's a time drag and a tedious process.