Abhishek Reddy — Sun, 14 May 2006 03:10:13 +0000

Incidentally, some more thoughts on articles.

I was hired a couple weeks ago to write daily articles for another site, and I hit the ground running. When I submitted my first draft for discussion, the admin liked it enough to publish it straight away, warts and all. That meant I had to try churning out new articles every evening, which was just impossible. I'm about 4 articles behind, and struggling to queue items up.

So it's a very good idea to build up that stack of articles. Throw in a few filler types that won't become outdated any time soon.

Personally, it takes about 2 hours across two days to come up with a 1000-word article (or review or tutorial) at best. That might be a good benchmark to plan around. 1 week's worth of buffer space per author is probably ideal - so 5 articles for a daily cycle, 1 or 2 for a weekly or bigger cycle.

Megan — Sat, 13 May 2006 22:46:29 +0000

Renegade - actually, I'd say that Online Business is more advanced. It's about setting up an actual business which most newbies aren't even close to doing. I also added "eCommerce" to that title to clarify

Megan — Sat, 13 May 2006 22:14:01 +0000

This is mocked up on the test server now:

http://test.webmaster-forums.net
login: twf/fun1ybun1

I did do Option A but the only difference is that red bar with "TWF Feedback and General Discussion". So imagine tht gone if you prefer option B. Liam and I also re-wrote the descriptions so they're shorter and clearer (and also get in some good SE keywords).

Is there anything else you'd like to see changed?

Renegade — Sat, 13 May 2006 22:03:36 +0000

"Marketing, SEO, and Online Business" Doesn't the "Online Business" make the "Marketing" and possibly (but not really) the "SEO" redundant?

Also, I'm not too sure the "Computer Help" section could go in the "Building your website" section either. Is something like "I forgot my Windows XP password, how do I get it back" getting help your computer? Yes. Is it help building your website? No.

May want to reorganise the forums inside the sections as well so that the most basic things are at the top and gets more advance as one goes down the list. Either that or go through it like a process.

For example:
# Promotion and Marketing
# Search Engine Challenges
# Online Business Discussion

Would be:
# Online Business Discussion
# Search Engine Challenges
# Promotion and Marketing

My logic behind that ordering would be, "Online Business Discussion" is a little generic so can be regarded as "basic." SEO second because one should IMHO get listed before doing a lot of promotion and marketing.

Megan — Sat, 13 May 2006 15:25:19 +0000

Who hasn't voted yet??? Once we get this finalized we might be able to go about doing it. I might start making some of the modifications on test.

I'm definitely preferring A right now - if we moved Critiques to Community Centre in B there would be 7 forums in that seciton (too many). That's the main difference.

JeevesBond — Fri, 12 May 2006 17:00:13 +0000

Abhi wrote:

Megan wrote: So I think we might rename General Discussion to Off-Topic or something like that. This person also suggested renaming Search Engine Challenges to Search Engine Optimization.

I agree with both.

So do I

And ideally we would like to have articles stacked-up, ready to release. As Megan was saying, I had the idea of doing this automatically, but we don't have to do that straight away.

Hopefully, if the Drupal link isn't too difficult it would be better to do it that way in the first place. Even if linking with Drupal takes a little more time, I won't then have to copy all the articles across. Which would be a burden.

Megan — Fri, 12 May 2006 14:39:11 +0000

Abhishek Reddy wrote: The trouble with forum posts is they can end up being too informal and lacking in editorial control or consistency.

Right, which is why we want to operate that section as we would an actual articles area. All articles would be proofread, edited, and approved before publication. It would be a moderated forum like critiques so new threads wouldn't show up right away. I would like to set up some sort of process for that where an article would be submitted, two reviewers would look at it and give feedback to the author, it would be revised and then approved.

However, before we commit to doing it that way Liam wants to take a look at the drupal link and what it would take to do that. It could be possible to have that done by the time we've got articles ready to post.

Abhishek Reddy — Fri, 12 May 2006 13:50:53 +0000

Megan wrote: I think if we have it as a forum (temporarily) it can be a little more informal. The danger with a regular schedule is that people will get annoyed if you don't stick to it.

The trouble with forum posts is they can end up being too informal and lacking in editorial control or consistency. Keeping up a regular schedule becomes easier the longer the publication queue is. Keeping 2 or more weeks ahead is plenty of time usually.

Megan wrote: So I think we might rename General Discussion to Off-Topic or something like that. This person also suggested renaming Search Engine Challenges to Search Engine Optimization.

I agree with both.

Megan wrote: BTW, make sure to vote for your favourite layout! We only have 3 votes so far. We can still tweak it once we decide on which basic layout we like best.

Voted B as per previous qualifications.

Megan — Fri, 12 May 2006 12:48:34 +0000

Possibly, I'm not sure. Liam was talking about doing something so that the articles would be released automatically on a certain date. Then we wouldn't be rushing to get something released at the right time. I think if we have it as a forum (temporarily) it can be a little more informal. The danger with a regular schedule is that people will get annoyed if you don't stick to it.

I got a little feedback on this at TAZ. One person pointed out the conflict between Webmaster's Corner and General Disscussion - he thought they were the same thing. So I think we might rename General Discussion to Off-Topic or something like that. This person also suggested renaming Search Engine Challenges to Search Engine Optimization.

BTW, make sure to vote for your favourite layout! We only have 3 votes so far. We can still tweak it once we decide on which basic layout we like best.

Renegade — Thu, 11 May 2006 22:49:06 +0000

Just to check, we are going to release these articles on a regular period right? As in, not releasing them all at the same time?

Something like Once every fortnight or month or something.