I don’t really mind what tech we use for the site, but I do feel quite strongly that we should work out what the next version is going to do before choosing new tech.
If a client came to us and said they wanted to rebuild the site exactly the same but using a new technology we’d reject the work on the basis that they’re focussing on the wrong problem.
Issues that I think are important to address in the next iteration include:
- 300 client logos is not a friendly or good way to introduce what we do and makes the site really slow
- there are dozens of overlapping “services” with very significant overlaps and no hierarchy or order which makes it unclear what we do
- it’s really hard to find the links to Join, About and Manifesto
- the link to this community are even harder to find
- the copy on the site is really out of date
- there is no way to search for a company or person that delivers the thing you need
- there are no case studies of the work we’ve done together (or even separately)
- there’s no news about what we’re up to - it could be defunct from what anyone can tell
- there are no pictures on the site - e.g. Manifesto « CoTech « Cooperative Technologists which might help people understand what we’re up to
- the 250+ people are not listed on the site and there is no idea of who they are or what they do
We may discover that the next version of the site would really benefit from having an API for some reason (or using decentralised data as proposed by the Happy Dev/Startin’ Blocks team. In that case a static site generator would probably not be appropriate.
I think we should at least wireframe the next iteration before undertaking the fairly significant task of getting 35 co-ops to re-enter their data. We should probably also vote on the new wireframes before going ahead and making them, so it’s not a technical barrier that is preventing us updating the site - it’s that no-one has suggested what changes we should make (other than bug fixes).