- Also as mentioned before the navigation is not really intuitive. This was the biggest problem with the old site so I would have thought it would have been the top priority of new site. I don’t get what you are trying to communicate, where links are trying to take me, and there is so much really old material on the home page that I don’t really want to look at it. Maybe I am still just struggling with why I even go to the IDSA website. Nothing really entices me other than to find out where and when the next conference is and that I could find out on the old site. I need reason and value for being there. What are you providing me that I can not get at the other sites that I have been going to for many years? Why should I be a frequent viewer of your site?
Yup, and thanks for chiming in Warren, that makes sense. It’s tough putting out something unfinished.
I give the recent grads who worked hard on this site credit, good job. I have worked with Drupal and it is a bear, IMO. There is a comment made about the huge undertaking of the site overhall, it has 3500+ articles. It seems like in an effort to transfer all the legacy content and shoehorn existing meta data into a new, but equally complex, organizational structure, the real valuable goal of a redesign (making the site relevant and accessible, not simply updating the appearance) was lost. And in the storm of old content, I’m lost.
Maybe, the IDSA should start over. Reboot. Start new, simple, small, intuitive and add old content as needed if it is relevant. Right now there are too many arbitrary sounding, seemingly duplicated tags/categories/etc. with everything interlinked and scattered about. Too much clicking. Give me 5 well designed, content rich pages, and then you are starting somewhere:
- Designbytes: is like a blog. Designbytes is a good newsletter, the web version could be more up-to-date, could integrate a twitter scrape
- Innovation: about the magazine, and maybe a featured article or two. The IDEA would be here with decent photo galleries.
- Events: A running calendar of national and local events, maybe links to flickr photo pools from past events.
- Education: Student resources, list of chapters, schools, connect with Facebook, featured students that link to coroflots?
- About IDSA: Firms, Cities, Members(+Fellows), IDSA history. Distill everything in the about section here.
We can do better.
(I’d also like to throw in a suggestion for the some type of continuing education webinar/resource in the future as mentioned in Yo’s sister thread. That’s a role I could see the idsa filling, short of accreditation.)