SPANpro.org site design critique

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Clay Clarkson on January 27, 2010 at 1:28pm

Enjoying SPANnet, and just now exploring SPANpro. Thought I'd throw my two-cents in since you asked for feedback (and that may be all my feedback is worth). These are just one man's observations, and I hope you will find them constructive and not critical. I've always said I'm a better coach than I am player, so that's true here, too. What you've done as a "player" so far is amazing. You are obviously guided by a commitment to excellence. I hope I can do as well soon with Ning. Thanks for the enormous sacrifice of time, effort, and thought that has gone into SPANnet so far. Great job!

Corporate ID: My first impression is that the overall corporate ID for SPAN seems to be getting lost in the new digital directions. The SPAN logo is clean and uncomplicated, but it does not say "books" or "publishing" and comes off more as a label than a logo. It feels to me like you need a stronger logo, with more graphic appeal, for the new SPAN. I would suggest the same thing for the section headers in SPANnet. The bridge and nature photos are nice, but they don't really create or reinforce any kind of corporate identity or mission. SPANnet is about people, so perhaps you should look for header graphics with real people (not corporate types) that will make the site feel more personal and approachable. The current graphics create a kind of subliminal cognitive disconnect for me.

SPAN blog: SPANnet is a great community feature, but I think I want SPANpro to be a separate identity, not a perceived extension of SPANnet. I understand the concept of SPANnet being a conduit for SPANpro, but I'm not sure that you need to tie SPANpro into the Ning structure. For me, having Scott's corporate blog within SPANnet seems to diminish its importance, rather than elevate it. I notice that SPANblog.org is available as a URL. Perhaps Scott's blog can be there, as a stand-alone blog that can reflect him as a person and as the SPANpro Executive Director. Make it distinct from SPANnet, and even SPANpro, and use it to personalize the corporate side of SPAN, as well as provide another conduit for potential membership. Just a thought.

SPANnet: I have to admit that I'm using SPANnet both as a member, and as a potential future user of Ning. It's a great way to learn the ropes, and see what works. On the macro level, I would say that most of my user experience has been very good so far. On the micro level, though, I have experienced several areas of frustration. Here are a few. -- In the Group home page interface, the Discussion feature is too easy to confuse with the Comments Wall. Rather than entering the Discussion (which requires several clicks), I think users tend to reply to what's in the Discussion as a Comment. // When I tried to Customize my My Page with the Newspaper format, the navigation bar will not fit, wraps around, and apparently knocks out the header. Couldn't use it. // The selection of Theme templates does not seem very attuned to an author and publisher community--the selection, to me anyway, seems very corporate, alternative, and male.

Hope something in all that will be helpful. Keep up the good work.

Permalink Reply by Bradley Flora on January 27, 2010 at 4:22pm

Clay,

Thank you very much for your thoughts, comments, and compliments! We ARE working hard to make this the best site it can possibly be for our members, and for the independent publishing industry in general. Your words are worth a lot more than two cents, today, as your perspective on our sites is of great value to us.

As we go forward into the future with the further development of this site, and of SPANpro.org, we will be taking your remarks into serious consideration. The only thing I will comment on right now, specifically, is in regard to the Executive Director's blog.

Originally, we considered another domain (like SPANblog.org) for Scott's blog, for exactly the reason that you recommended: we would like for the Executive Director's blog to be a stand alone and unique brand from the rest of SPANnet. However, we also wanted to support the SPANnet community and take advantage of the ning architecture (like the internal RSS "Feature" function-which I admit in hindsight could be easily supplemented with a 3rd domain's RSS feed).

As well, we see that having Scott's blog on SPANnet.org is a positive way to support our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) goals. Specifically, by maintaining the Executive Director's blog on the SPANnet.org domain we are helping to focus and increase our site traffic numbers, when in turn helps our Google and SEO ranking. This in turn allows us to be found by more people who might be new to SPANnet, and in turn this strengthens our community: allowing new ideas, questions, and answers to be brought into our public sphere of discussion.

Our paradigm has shifted, no longer are we communicating with our members and our community through our print newsletter. The focus is now digital, and the potential resource of what SPAN can become for neophytes and experts in the independent publishing industry is just now beginning to be explored. While Scott is the leader, and the head of this community, we took into consideration the idea that he is just one of many experts who will be posting and sharing information on the site.

We are certainly open to expanding upon, strengthening, and exploring options in regard to SPAN’s brand.

And literally in the long run, we may have enough site traffic on SPANnet.org that the Executive Directors contribution to the numbers would not affect our SEO ranking, allowing us to move in a direction of hosting his branded blog posts off site, while still keeping them on the SPANnet.org homepage through an RSS reader. With those two thoughts in mind, the best reason I can come up with why it would be very beneficial for all of us for Scott to stay with a ning-hosted blog would be for product-testing and development purposes.

If we are working with the same blog-publishing software that the community is using, it is even easier for us to see it from your perspective, and to see any potential problems before they arise.

In regard to what I’ve mentioned above:

What is your opinion on this trade-off today between SEO and a clean word-press style blog using a 3rd domain? And how do you feel about the idea of keeping his blog in the community as a way to support and debug the technical challenges that may arise?

Thanks again for your time and for your good ideas.

Sincerely,

Bradley Flora
Technical Director
SPANnet.org

Permalink Reply by Clay Clarkson on January 27, 2010 at 5:57pm

Just a few quick follow-up comments, and then I'm done. My blog plea is compleat (sic).

I understand your reasoning, and agree that the beta phase is wet cement, a time to test and taste all the options before the concrete sets. But I would add this thought. Most of us who join the SPANnet community also have stand-alone blogs of various kinds that we maintain. It's an extra commitment for me, or anyone, to also create and maintain a SPANnet blog, even though it's a great way to be involved in the community. I think it would be reasonable, and perhaps even a good model of user experience, if Scott were to have both a SPANnet blog and a SPANblog blog (or whatever). The former would be his involvement in the SPANnet community; the latter his voice as SPAN Executive Director.

I have always valued Scott's voice in the print newsletters, but if those go away I'm not sure if his SPANnet blog will be able to replace the newsletter. It's like his voice has been assimilated by the Borg. Honestly, I would be much more likely to bookmark his URL, and subscribe to his feed, if he had a blog at a discreet domain, and it looked like a "real" blog rather than a Ning blog page. SEO aside, it's possible you could do better by pushing traffic to SPANnet from a SPANblog, than by attempting to pull it in from the Ning internal blog.

It's not exactly parallel, I know, but a model that comes to mind is something like Michael Hyatt's blog (www.michaelhyatt.com, CEO of Thomas Nelson). He has created an incredible stand-alone, personal blog that greatly enhances the value of his publishing company's brand. If Scott was occasionally posting his own thoughts on his own blog, but also posting articles by others, I think it would still enhance his reputation as ED, and should push visitors to SPANnet.

Anyway, all that said, I understand your strategy of trying to make SPANnet your "open" channel and public face, and SPANpro your "member" channel and private face. That certainly makes sense. However, my experience with other Ning sites is that they require a commitment that only some people out of your audience and potential customer pool will want to make. If it's the only public point of contact on the web, I would argue it's too limited (many will simply avoid it). In contrast, subscribing to a blog is a near-universal experience, does not require a commitment to involvement and will, theoretically, attract many more. Of course, I reserve the right to be completely and stupidly wrong, but I'm just interacting as an armchair analyst. I'm done. Peace out.

Permalink Reply by Bradley Flora on February 9, 2010 at 4:42pm

Clay,

Thanks again for taking the time to respond, your thoughts are certainly appreciated.

To start, one of the things we look to teach, and something that is also one of our own online marketing goals, is to continue to streamline the process of sharing and publishing information. To this end, we recommend that SPANnet members who already have a blog, continue to publish there, and instead of publishing a parallel blog on SPANnet, share their original blog’s RSS feed on their SPANnet.org profile page.

Additionally, and in regard to the Ning themes and profile customization, we recognize that there is currently limited professional appeal with the Ning themes, and the options for your profile page. Beyond that, there is direct CSS customization, and we see great potential in members using CSS code to make their profile pages visually appealing to viewers of the page. In the long run, I hope to be able to create some CSS tutorials or even free product packages that our members can use to customize their pages beyond what Ning generically has to offer.

As well, we reduced the number of items in the menu, so that when you use a theme with a single line for the menu, it should all fit. At this point, the header will continue to be blank, because that’s just the way Ning works as a default. I’ve done some initial testing and do see a way that we can install images into that header space, and I plan to write a comprehensive tutorial on that issue in the near future.


In regard to the Span Executive Director’s blog: at this point, we’re most interested in creating a powerful online marketing tool for our members while streamlining the information shared and syndicated on the public Executive Director’s blog. To do so, we would like to fully explore the potential of the Executive Director’s blog on Ning by making it exactly what we want through visual customization, which in turn will allow us the knowledge to offer additional customization packages for our members. This way, we can work to improve the visual impact of all our members profile pages, while efficiently directing our energy towards our corporate presence.

In that regard, my question for you is: what do you see about the Ning platform that would keep us from achieving your envisioned potential of a stand-alone ED blog? Because there is allot of flexibility within this Ning platform, and there is a good chance that as we continue to come up a “wish list”, it may be very feasible to enact those changes.

Sincerely,

Bradley Flora
Technical Director
SPANnet.org