Rearranging site

[PhilR]

It's just occured to me that it'd probably be better to have Retailers and BWE Archive as a separate page linked to in the menu (like the home page) that way we can just have the one discussion thread/forum, like in the old BWE.

How does that sound?

CT Integration I'm going to be working on and I should be able to get it going soon barring any unforseen difficulties.

[JimHow]

We definitely should rearrange it, I'm wondering if we should wait until Tuesday to do that at this point. Michael had asked a couple days ago whether we could make access to the forum more prominent on the welcome page. I'd like to see us tinker with the welcome page cautiously at this point because I like the current look of it, but I do agree that the retailers and archive sections (and cellartracker?) should be separate from the main discussion forum. Where on the welcome page are you planning on putting the separate links?

[JimHow]

As for more prominent direction to the forum, we could possibly change the last sentence of our greeting to say:
Please take a minute to register and join us in our message board forum!

The underlined part would be a link to the forum.

That way we would have three links to the forum: at the top, at the bottom, and in our welcome message.

I notice the words "Welcome to Bordeaux Wine Enthusiasts" on the home page also constitute a link right back to the home page, I wonder if it might not make sense to turn that into a link to the forum, that would make a total of four links to the message board on the homepage.

[JimHow]

On the other hand, I just went back to the homepage and it seems pretty obvious to even a computer nitwit like me how to enter the forum. Maybe at this late date we should hold off on any changes to our homepage until Tuesday or later in the week.

[PhilR]

I meant to put the links to those pages in the menu bar between 'Home' and 'Forum', I'll do little icons for them as well like I have for the forum link, that way they'll be always accesible.

This is pretty quick to do, and I think it'd be better to get it set up this way before we open the site to avoid presenting people with a change soon after opening.

The home page content can be changed any time obviously. One thing I have thought of is to make the word "register" a link to the registration form, if we did that it'd make sense to include a link to the forum as well I think.

[PhilR]

Oh, and Cellar Tracker integration doesn't need it's own page. If/when we get that going what will happen is that when someone posts a TN on CT, they'll have an option to post it to BWE as well, then it'll appear here as a new topic in the forum. Is that how you envisioned it? Want to make sure we're thinking of the same thing!

[PhilR]

I'm off to bed now. Jim if you can let me know what you think about this I'll be able to do it in the morning so you'll have time to review it before launch, as I say they're not big changes and are easy to put back if desired.

[JimHow]

Okay why don't you go ahead and do it Phil, I'll check in about 7 a.m. my time and take a look at it before I go to court.

The cellartracker option sounds great if that's something Eric Levine is willing to go along with.

[DavidG]

I e-mailed Eric Levine about this - he said CellarTracker can't do autoposting to phpBBs. Some kind of security issues that are too complex to work around - he's tried and failed with Robin Garr's WLDG which runs the same software. So we are limited to cut/paste. So I would just delete the CellarTracker forum.

[PhilR]

HI David, yes I talked to him as well, but I think I can program something up that will allow him to do autoposting so I just told him that I'd have a look in to it and get back to him.

[PhilR]

OK I've made the changes; in summary:

• Deleted all other forums except this one (moved CT topic from that forum to this one first) and renamed this forum "Forum".
• Changed forum link in menu so that it goes straight to this forum and not the "top-level", i.e so users don't have to click it then click again to go in to the (now only) forum.
• Moved retailers info to its own page and made an icon for its link
• Set up BWE archive page with note explaining status and also made icon for that

So, let me know what you think

[JimHow]

Looks good to me!

[DavidG]

Looks great! Much better this way.

If we ever get too busy, we can always add a separate forum, say for offlines, etc. But a single forum is just fine for our size.