Web designers wanted!

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FosseWay
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Web designers wanted!

Post by FosseWay »

SABRE wishes to appoint one or more web designers to help redesign the SABRE website.

Working with our developers team and the Committee, you will develop a new look and feel for the site which will be consistent across the whole site: the forum, the wiki and maps - Discuss, Digest and Discover.

Ideally you will have experience of dealing with designs for both phpbb3 and mediawiki, but the key requirements are enthusiasm and willingness to try.

Web designers will be appointed to the Committee for the duration of their work (or until the next AGM, whichever comes first) and must therefore be Voting Members of the Society. If you are interested but are not currently a Voting Member you will have to apply here.

If you are interested in this role, please PM me.

Thanks!

Alex
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ScottB5411
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Re: Web designers wanted!

Post by ScottB5411 »

I wholly encourage anyone with an interest to apply for this role, if you can help, please do so!
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c2R
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Re: Web designers wanted!

Post by c2R »

Just a bump really to echo Scott's post - does anyone have design skills and a bit of time to spare? This is a project that we need to move ahead with to support new technologies and mobile devices (and to some extent existing ones that have crept up upon us).

There is support from the SMT and committee officers to assist in the role, and flexibility in timescales, so any applicant won't be on their own to do everything by yesterday!
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pmailkeey
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Re: Web designers wanted!

Post by pmailkeey »

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I'm seeing new style websites all over the place and I absolutely hate them.

Take this as a massive thumbs down to extreme change.

Mike.
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Johnathan404
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Re: Web designers wanted!

Post by Johnathan404 »

pmailkeey wrote: Sun Nov 04, 2018 18:42 If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Rest assured the issue has been raised because the website is very "broke".

We frequently have comments from members who didn't know half the features we have are there; increasingly fewer people are going to discover SABRE because we are being penalised for our desktop-optimised website and our efforts to promote the website are being hampered by old-fashioned code which social media cannot pick up on.
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Re: Web designers wanted!

Post by Chris5156 »

pmailkeey wrote: Sun Nov 04, 2018 18:42If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I'm seeing new style websites all over the place and I absolutely hate them.

Take this as a massive thumbs down to extreme change.
You have no idea what a redesigned SABRE website would look like. Nobody does because it hasn't been designed yet. How can you be sure you'd absolutely hate it? How do you know the change would be extreme?

As Johnathan says, it needs to be rebuilt for a whole host of very good reasons. I'm afraid one member declaring that they don't like new things will not change that!

(Your signature is also very odd. If you don't agree with the T&Cs then don't click the button to accept them. You were never under duress to accept them because you are free at any time to stop using SABRE.)
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Re: Web designers wanted!

Post by AndyB »

I’m leading on this in the background, and I don’t mind sharing my priorities.

1. Get more consistent look and feel across the site so that the Wiki, the Maps, the forums and the miscellaneous bits and pieces all run off more or less the same template and they do it well.

2. Build on the Digest-Discover-Discuss branding.

3. Deal with some of the anomalies in the background (I know about quite a few, and I’m quite sure that there are plenty more!)

4. (And possibly most importantly) make the place easier to use for all users.

In short, what is broken will be fixed. What could be better will hopefully be improved.

But I’ve no interest, and nor does anyone else in the SMT or the Committee at large, in making anything worse or more difficult.
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pmailkeey
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Re: Web designers wanted!

Post by pmailkeey »

Is there a real need to have everything samey ?

Who's having difficulty with it ?

You could take out nearly all the colour from text and background - preferably specifying none or both! That way people can view it in the colours they like as they're taken from system settings.
Ticking of the box agreeing to the Ts & Cs was forced - done under duress - therefore I don't necessarily agree with them.
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Re: Web designers wanted!

Post by c2R »

I'm having difficulty with it. Moderation of the wiki is difficult on a mobile device for example.

Software also continually needs patching and upgrading for security and compatibility reasons. You cant Simply bury your head in the sand.

It is broken, read the posts above again. It does need fixing, even if just from a technical perspective and therefore that is what the smt and committee are committed to doing.
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Re: Web designers wanted!

Post by Chris5156 »

Here’s how the main website navigation appears on mobile. I’d say that’s pretty broken.
1E0EFA11-70F2-4C3D-9098-5DCCEED6B9FA.jpeg
We’ve also reached a point where the SABRE Maps interface is stopping progress adding new map layers, because it was never designed to handle the number of layers we have now, and the maps experience on mobile is really not very good.

Not to mention that search engines will now demote sites like this in search results simply because it uses old technology and fails to support mobile devices properly.
mikehindsonevans
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Re: Web designers wanted!

Post by mikehindsonevans »

Having recently re-vamped the Association website for the old-boys (and now renamed old-students) association at my former school, one of the major Critical Success Factors was getting a clear idea of what was wanted, prioritising, piloting and testing.

There is a risk (which I why I am not going to volunteer for SABRE's revamp - sorry!) that a half-baked set of requirements would be subjected to some non-binary (I'll explain in a sec) criticisms:
eg "I don't like the number of colours" (OK how many do you want)
eg "it won't run on my browser" (we discovered, by accident, that using Google+ to authenticate onto WIX.com gets hung in Internet Explorer and EDGE, but works fine on Chrome - embarrassing when you want to log in quickly to update the "news" page! So much for f**gg*ng inter-operability between browsers!)

The first "whinge" is dealt with by adopting a policy of "benevolent dictatorship" - "this is how it will be"
The second is a minefield of future maintenance workload and needs to be carefully considered BEFORE starting the website re-development.

The non-binary aspect comes from those who, for the following year, will sit on the sidelines and ask "why didn't you try xxx, yyy, zzz?" without having participated in the review of needs and options when you will, painstakingly and accurately, have consulted on needs.

For me, this is an interesting website, which has triggered useful discussions (usually held in an amazingly polite atmosphere despite clearly-expressed and profoundly-opposite views).

However, I wouldn't want the "but *you* changed that" splatterback heading in my direction!
Good luck!
Mike
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Re: Web designers wanted!

Post by AndyB »

As I make this post, I see the most obviously broken part (to the normal user) of the site right in front of me.

The fact that every page on the forums part of the site has two SABRE logos.

We've tinkered at the edges, but for the time being we can't fix this without a full redesign.

The "samey" complaint I will answer with another word. "Professional."
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Euan
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Re: Web designers wanted!

Post by Euan »

Apologies if this has been discussed before, but are user sessions intended to time out incredibly soon after logging in? Sometimes this can happen within one minute of logging in and I have noticed this when writing posts or making edits the wiki. I'm not sure what others do, but as a precautionary measure I always highlight and copy the text within the box so that it can be pasted back just in case I have to revisit the login screen and end up losing the text - it did happen once while writing a lengthy post! This does seem to be more of a problem when I am using a tablet device rather than a desktop PC though. I say sometimes because the session expiry periods are often irregular - sometimes it is barely a few moments after logging in and other times you can last quite a while without having to log in again.

Is there an underlying fault that needs to be fixed or could it be a maximum site capacity preventing more than a fixed number of users from being logged in simultaneously?
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Re: Web designers wanted!

Post by c2R »

Euan wrote: Tue Nov 06, 2018 14:10 Apologies if this has been discussed before, but are user sessions intended to time out incredibly soon after logging in? Sometimes this can happen within one minute of logging in and I have noticed this when writing posts or making edits the wiki. I'm not sure what others do, but as a precautionary measure I always highlight and copy the text within the box so that it can be pasted back just in case I have to revisit the login screen and end up losing the text - it did happen once while writing a lengthy post! This does seem to be more of a problem when I am using a tablet device rather than a desktop PC though. I say sometimes because the session expiry periods are often irregular - sometimes it is barely a few moments after logging in and other times you can last quite a while without having to log in again.

Is there an underlying fault that needs to be fixed or could it be a maximum site capacity preventing more than a fixed number of users from being logged in simultaneously?
Occasionally I go through periods of getting it a lot, and then sometimes it doesn't happen for ages. It is really annoying. If you are getting it a lot on a particular day, try closing browser tabs, clearing the cookies for the site and then logging back in again.
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Re: Web designers wanted!

Post by Ritchie333 »

pmailkeey wrote: Sun Nov 04, 2018 18:42If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Normally, I'd agree with you (which is why I still use bash and vi after 25 years of doing so), but with respect to being able to properly support mobiles and tablets, Google has been penalising us for not updating our user interface to be mobile friendly since about 2011. This is why search for the sites have dropped down its pagerank. I have got a solution for a mobile skin on the wiki, but it requires an appropriate integration plan. So yeah, it's broke alright.
Euan wrote:Apologies if this has been discussed before, but are user sessions intended to time out incredibly soon after logging in?
No. It's because the phpBB and MediaWiki software cookies, designed to stop spamming and hijacking, really don't play well with each other. Most sites don't try and combine the authentication systems together, and hence don't have this problem.
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Truvelo
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Re: Web designers wanted!

Post by Truvelo »

Are the php and wiki cookies really that problematic towards each other? Before the wiki upgrade earlier this year there was never a problem with being logged out whenever visiting the wiki. Now it happens each and every time.

Believe you me, I would really like to help solve these problems but I have absolutely no programming experience so it's a case of can't rather than won't.
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Re: Web designers wanted!

Post by ForestChav »

When we took the decision a while back to implement single sign on between phpBB and MediaWiki (at the time of putting the Wiki live) there was a MW plug in which handled authentication via phpBB's auth db, which worked well: I think at some point in an upgrade path (necessary for other reasons) it broke, and since it wasn't maintained couldn't be revived. Sadly this is how OSS often works.
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c2R
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Re: Web designers wanted!

Post by c2R »

I seem to go through phases of being logged out all the time when switching betwene the two and then not being logged out for ages. this weekend has been particularly bad up to now, but now seems fine again!
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Fenlander
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Re: Web designers wanted!

Post by Fenlander »

I tend to ignore the Wiki because of the log in issue but still go through occasional bouts of disconnection anyway.
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c2R
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Re: Web designers wanted!

Post by c2R »

:cry:
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