At the Talk About Local Unconference earlier in the month there was a competition to win a “website makeover” which I was asked to hep out on as part of my work with Talk About Local, a 4ip-funded project to encourage and support hyperlocal blogging across the UK.
The makeover took place today and the winner was Alison Smith who runs the Pesky People blog, campaigning about web accessibility issues for disabled people (which, now I think about it, is not strictly a hyperlocal site but let’s not worry about that for now!) Alison had got her blog going through Nick Booth’s Social Media Surgeries and I’d actually helped her with some small things before so this was going to be stage two.
The TAL gang will be reporting on this properly as a resource for others to use but I wanted to just jot down a few thoughts from today’s session.
First off, here’s how her site currently looks at peskypeople.wordpress.com:
Alison came in with a bundle of A3 sheets covered in ideas and maps for how she saw the site working.
As a group we talked through Alison’s long term aims for the site with the full knowledge that we would not be able to achieve most of them during this session. We needed to have an idea of what she wanted to be doing 6 – 12 months down the line so we could put the right stepping stones in place today. Once we had this we transferred the essentials onto the whiteboard to get a better handle on things:
Next we had a look at some sites Alison liked the look and feel of. The main inspiration was Disability Arts Online for the navigation and, in the long term, the ability to change the look of the site along disability lines (something we weren’t able to touch on today). We also looked at some basic accessibility things that were within our capabilities such as adding a “jump to content” link at the top of the page that is invisible to visual readers but shows up on text-to-speech browsers. I then produced one of my trademarked Website Wireframe Diagrams to work from:
(Thanks to @chrisivens for the constructive criticism of this diagram.)
With all this in mind we ploughed through loads of Wordpress themes, picked out a few that had three columns (a sidebar on each side of the content) and went through them with Alison. By lunch time we’d chosen AndyBlue as our theme because it was nearly right and had relatively clean code that wasn’t based on a table, thus making it better for text-to-speech readers. (The theme that’s currently running ASH10.com, Atahualpa, is based on a table, I discovered, which was very disappointing as it’s an otherwise great theme. Ah well.)
Next Alison sat down with web developer Pete Scotch Egg and myself to decide on the essential changes to the theme. These were mainly to do with text sizes and navigation and Pete had most of them sorted by the end of the day. Currently the site looks like this:
Pete’s got a few more tweaks to do over the weekend (the left hand navigation duplicates, for example, and we want to have a Scotch Egg illustration in the header) but it’s 90% there.
While this was going on Mike Rawlins, one of the TAL team, was installing BBpress which we’ll be integrating as a forum for the site (chosen because it’s stripped down and simple and ran through the text-to-speech reader fairly well) and sorting out the new peskypeople.com domain we’ll be moving everything on to next week while I talked with Alison about the content she’s going to be writing for the site. Will Perrin and Nicky Getgood were also on hand to help Alison think more clearly about what her aims are and who her intended audience might be.
By the end of the day we’d achieved a fair amount and were tired but happy. Here’s Alison clearly demonstrating the tired/happy thing.
(The happy was also fueled by the incredible response to her post about being a deaf person at Hello Digital on Wednesday which, while being a great thing, also helped us frame what the potential of the site was.)
For myself I think I learned as much from Alison as she learned from us. It was an incredibly rewarding day and while we still have some work to do polishing it off and showing her how to use everything before it launched properly next week we really did good stuff as a team today. Fantastic stuff.
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