[theforum] back to basics

Tara Cleveland tara.cleveland at gmail.com
Mon Nov 17 14:27:32 CST 2008


Hi All,

I've seriously thought about quitting evolt in the last few days. I
think it's partially because I feel like things are a bit off the
rails...

Some thoughts:

1. we really need to do a proper IA and decide who our audience is,
what we want to achieve, and what evolt really is and get that nailed
before we continue talking about what to call the support/donate areas
and what colours go where. Unless we start from the beginning I think
there's going to be a lot of going around in circles.

2. I think all of the current designs are really unprofessional and
not even close to the standard that evolt should have. In fact, I'd
say that none of them are any better than what is there now and it's a
waste of time trying to implement them. I know that's pretty harsh,
but frankly, I'd be embarrassed to say I had anything to do with any
of them if they went live in anything like the state they are in now.
And that's me being brutally honest. I'm talking only about visual
design and nav and layout and stuff - I have no real idea what goes on
with the DB or the servers. I say this about the design I did awhile
back as well by the way... I don't think they need to be tweaked I
think they need to be overhauled.

3. Maybe we should have a schedule where we can talk about specific
issues at specific points. I see a serious lack of focus and process
and a lot of going around in circles. There's always a lot of that in
any volunteer organization where people put time in as they have it,
but I think we *really* need to police ourselves in the focus
department - and see point 1 above. ;-)

4. we need to nail down what we are going to launch in the redesign.
Are we adding a new design to planet.evolt.org and saying that's an
official part of what evolt is? Are we adding new features? google
maps thingy? does that have to be part of it? what the other features
we want? Designing an IA and a visual design for a moving target is
pretty difficult - especially if it's changed daily and there are no
actual *decisions* just new suggestions.

Can we write and decide upon a document that says what the hell we are
aiming on launching instead of coming up with loads of new features as
we're designing the pages, as we're redoing databases and back-end,
platforms and servers? Can we please bite off what we can chew?

Come on people, let's do this properly!

So as you may have noticed... I've decided to really stick my oar in
and say what I think instead of standing back and waiting to see where
the chips fall. Which I suppose means I'm not quitting. :-)

I love you all to bits and I think evolt is great! Go us!

Tara



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