Reorganising & improving our forum

I think the BBB tutorial videos are still not linked from the website. For example, not signposted from FAQs. Are they to hand? Can they be posted @melissamcnab

And it will be great to have Videos - meet.coop included in site navigation. Perhaps at the top level? Or top level under ‘About’?

Just a note: the website has been edited by Jekyll in the beginning of meet.coop, but with the help of Oli and Mel we migrated to WordPress. That CMS allows us to maintain the website content without technical knowledge, other then finding your way in WordPress.

I’m trying to understand why you would redirect people from forum to web and then back to forum? create a forum landing page on the website. Cause the forum itself has already got its own dynamic landing. What do you want o explain in this extra landing?

It would seem acceptable to create a landing in the website which links to the forum landing page (Discourse), so website visitors new to the community forum get a special introduction. But I don’t see the need to redirect, that distracts people unnecessarily? Also let us learn from other more successful Discourse forums. I have never seen something like this…

my 2 cents

Maybe we can keep the website as minimal as possible and post links to these videos in our FAQ section?

that’s easy, if we agree on the top level category to be created where they can go underneath? Maybe “marketing kit” or so? And then underneath About? We’d also include also a page with the slide decks.

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@wouter and I have discussed how navigation in the forum/handbook might be more visual bcos some people work better on visuals than text. The existing landing page (main categories plus recent topics https://forum.meet.coop/) is very text-y, with just tiny dabs of colour coding. And you have to scroll a lot to get the picture, which even then looks linear, not branching.

In principle it would be good (?) to have a landing page that is as visual as possible. This might contain a Table of contents (admittedly, text, but with nesting of elements (categories) shows structure visually). Might also offer tag-based routes into the forum/handbook (purpose-oriented filters on content). In Wordpress we also have greater scope for graphic design of a landing page, where visual form and colour play a greater part?

Whatever . . We’d need to experiment with ToC plugin and with tag-based navigation b4 switching to any another kind of landing than the one we already have. In principle though, a better presentation of ‘ways in’ and overall structure may be possible?

@melissamcnab did you find any designer colleagues with knowledge of Discourse . . who might help us unravel these questions of design-for-fluent- navigation in the forum?

Also: what icon library(ies) might we be able to draw on, to increase the visual dimension of the forum? I’ve seen Fontawesome but am far from convinced it’s the kind of thing that helps a lot in this context. Forum navigation isn’t quite the same as website graphic design? What 'd’you think?