MeyerBros

things we think

purpose

8 Responses to “purpose”

1. mennonot Says:
   

   May 16th, 2006 at 5:36 pm

   I think the strongest part of the site right now is the blog. So it makes sense to focus the site around it. Here are a few thoughts on:

   1. Put the blog front and center at meyerbros.org. This is the most regularly updated part of the site and its what will keep people’s attention. The only useful thing on your main page right now is your purpose statement which could be put on the side bar of the blog.

   2. Discipline All 3 of you should try to post regularly, even if its just a little bit. Team blogs are interesting when they have regular and varied content from a range of personalities. Give us a bit of a window into your lives and what you think about life (like Eric’s militant agnosticism rant). If you’re doing work elsewhere on the site (or web), post a link to it. Write short reviews of books and films you see and read.

   3. More color And add some photos to posts every once in a while. Consider adding an image gallery.

   4. Do some networking This is hard for Mennonites to do, but you’ve got to do it. When you’ve written an interesting article find forums and wikis where people would be interested and post a link. Its a good way to get a few comments and a bit of interaction going which in turn might motivate you to post new content.

2. michelle Says:
   

   May 17th, 2006 at 11:57 am

   I agree with all of the above. Every point. Great ideas. I may have more thoughts later. But I wanted to post a comment because two comments make it a “discussion” as requested. (and proves that someone else is reading what you’re writing!)

3. eric Says:
   

   May 17th, 2006 at 3:46 pm

   thanks both of you. i like the thoughts. i was also thinking we could:

   1. do some touchup work on the purpose statement/introduction and sit it front and center of the content on the front page. a more clear purpose statement would also help us:
   2. break down a basic site structure and add some more sturdy navigation. something like “blog // games // wiki // about us” or “blog // projects // about us” or whatever fits. that way it will be easier to find your way around.
   3. only have the last three(?) blog entries on the front page (so as not to overwhelm), and give some space to a blogroll, or a links-of-the-day box, or a photo-of-the-day or any other nice regularly updated content that doesn’t really deserve it’s own page.

   the idea is when someone hits our front page (or anywhere inside) it should be intuitively obvious how to get what out of our site. that means we need to know what we content we have to offer (want to offer?) and where it is (should be?).

   i agree that the blog is currently central to that (though the css zen-garden toy is getting updated almost as often and is currently unexplained).it should certainly be featured, but i think the front page should give a more clear and precise intro to our site than the blog index currently does.

4. mennonot Says:
   

   May 18th, 2006 at 7:19 am

   On a completely unrelated note, I think its funny that the top of this post now reads:

   « bad news
   more apathyism »

   Purpose

5. eric Says:
   

   May 18th, 2006 at 11:50 am

   brilliant.

   another thought is: i don’t see a good reason for this blog to be reserved for the three of us - especially while Tim and Michelle are much more reliable… I know that anyone can already register, but I’m not sure what permissions that gives you. I’d be glad to say we should add regular trusted commenters to the blogging core users.

   thoughts on that?

6. carl Says:
   

   May 18th, 2006 at 4:01 pm

   my thoughts:

   1. if we’re interested in attracting and keeping repeat users, the most interesting content is always the most recently updated content. So I don’t agree with putting a purpose statement or anything static centrally on the front page. I think it should be prominently linked in the side bar for new visitors who are confused.

   2. I think the three (four? five? six?) of us are involved in plenty of interesting things across an astonishingly wide array of interests to make an interesting blog without trying to shoehorn it into a structure or focus (that’s what categories are for, so let’s have lots of them). There are plenty of blogs out there which basically consist of whatever their author(s) happened to think was interesting that day, and if their authors are involved in interesting things (I think we are) and are good writers (we might be, sometimes), and update the content regularly (I’ll try) they attract viewers well enough. Someday I may want a more focused site (such as for MeyerBros Web Design and Development, Inc). Right now I don’t know that I have a use for one.

   3. All that said, I welcome whatever efforts you feel like putting into some purpose pages linked from the sidebar, clearer nav structure, or whatnot.

   4. I think Tim is right on about what makes a good blog.

   5. I already have a blogroll (from bloglines) and a recent bookmarks list (from del.icio.us), but they’ve been banished to my author page, which I doubt anyone will ever visit. I’d like to make them more visible, because I think they are interesting and the del.icio.us links get updated regularly even when I’m not focusing on meyerbros.org. They don’t represent all of us, though, just me. So do they belong on the front page sidebar, or where?

   6. I definitely agree with making the blog front and center. I think we should keep the wiki as kind of a “backend repository” for non-blog-like content that can be quickly updated (more easily than Wordpress pages) and linked to from blog entries. Like I did today with my MoviesToSee wiki page. Although maybe that confuses users (should I comment by editing the wiki page, or comment on the blog post?), and I should just post everything as blog entries. Dunno.

   7. In any case, I’ll go right ahead, right now, at this very moment, and shift things so that going to www.meyerbros.org (or just meyerbros.org) takes you to the blog instead of the wiki.

   8. By all means, Michelle and Tim should be able to post! If you want to, that is. Go ahead and register yourself (doesn’t look like you have yet), and if that in itself doesn’t give you the ability to post, any of us MeyerBros can upgrade your permissions easily enough in the site admin.

   9. If only I could think of a couple more things, this could be a nice round list of 10 items. Sigh.

7. eric Says:
   

   May 18th, 2006 at 7:42 pm

   1. right. i think that may not even be necessary if we have an “about us” page. see #3.
   2. good.
   3. there are some things on the sidebar already that seem important to have, but not necessarily in that location. i also still find the sidebar hard to read (my problem, i may play with that). foe example:
      • could the list of authors and their archives move to an “about us” page? our purpose would also go there and any other explination we find important.
      • the majority of the “etc.” block could be moved to the bottom of the page or is already duplicated there. that could be cleaned up.
      • styles could also potentially move to a back page called “design” or something. that page could also include our explination of validation
      • that would clean up some clutter and make room for: see #5.

      we would then have a main nav bar that includes “blog | wiki | design | about us”. that helps me feel like it’s a unified site already.

   4. i agree. tim is always right.
   5. what is bloglines and how do you get your del.icio.us links onto a sidebar? i think it’s a good idea for any of us who are so inspired (i am) to do that same thing. would there be a way of compiling them together somehow on the index page so we have a list of most recent from everyone, and then seperated out on our individual pages?
   6. i think movie and book reviews (at least) should get blogged. it makes some sense to do lists on the wiki - and we can each link to those as we chose.
   7. fantastic. thanks.
   8. not only should others register and use the blog, but they should feel free to use the wiki for making their own profiles and movie lists and uploading their own papers.
8. carl Says:
   

   May 18th, 2006 at 7:55 pm

   6. Yeah, I agree, I’ll blog my reviews from now on. And I’ll try to stick to one topic per post, to make commenting easier

   5. bloglines is the online blog reader I use. You can browse all my RSS feed subscriptions at bloglines.com. And they have a web API so I can write a sidebar widget that downloads and displays the list of my feeds as a blogroll. Which I did (actually, I borrowed and modified code from somewhere else. I love open source). Same deal for del.icio.us. If you started using either service, I could easily tweak my widgets to get your feeds and bookmarks. With a little more work, I could probably tweak the code to aggregate for the frontpage.

   3. Ok, I’ll get rid of etc. I’m slightly concerned that that makes registering even harder to find, but perhaps that won’t be a problem. I’m in favor of moving styles to a design page that talks about validation and all that. In fact, we already have such a page, though you might want to rename it and tweak it. I’ll let you handle that, go for it. And if you make an “about us” page, I’ll link to that from the sidebar and move the author list there, as you mentioned.