Agree. In this case, I had to flag the issue, because I wrote to the Commune de Forest and judged that the website was unfit for purpose: adding the link would have decreased our chances to get a successful meeting. What must not happen in Edgeryders is box-ticking: “ok, this is done, move on” without wondering “does it serve the purpose for which we did it in the first place”?
Thanks, but it’s more than expression. “Step in” means temporarily revoking delegation of responsibility and going into what Nadia calls “micromanagement mode”. Which I hate, but sometimes it needs to be done, and then it is the project leader’s duty to do it. Just so we are clear.
It is not “the final quality” since this website is an iterative process, right from the start of this thread. As in “client provides some specifications, I implement it, client looks at it, rinse & repeat”. That’s the best process I have come up with so far, after way too many unworkable “make me a website I like” projects for various clients. I’ll change any part of the website as often as desired, as long as it stays inside the hours included for this in the offer.
In this case, specifications from your (Edgeryders) side were one graphic so far … which is, umh, very scarce. Assuming that you don’t have time to express more clearly what you expect the website to look like, I propose (see above) that @ilaria goes back to our designer and gets us the contracted frontpage wireframe designs for both the existing Reef and Sci-Fi Economics Lab websites. If you like that design proposal, that’s a spec I can work with. Alternatively you can provide an example website where the style looks right to you. What does not work is “make me a website I like”, because neither original designs nor mindreading are one my skills, and these are consequently not on offer
Now this is a funny situation as I’m somehow on both sides of the contract. I take it as an educational experience: it helps to see things from both sides by personal experience in order to keep this company a place where contractors like to work for …
Of course. What I mean is: I stayed completely out of it, considering that I am pretty low maintenance in terms of visuals, but then when I needed to use it I decided it was not yet good enough.
@Matthias: wondering if you can replace the slides on thereef.brussels with the photos/quotes from here? normally, they shouldnt have all the logos overlaid, but well…
I have a lot more quotes and photos of other participants, but not sure how to create similar filters. I can try thoguh, let me know if you would need them:
Sure, can do (today I think). So far there are three slides with people and quotes made by Lorenzo, so more would be better. When you upload the participant photos you have (named by the people) and put their quotes somewhere, I’ll create more. The filters are not difficult to make.
Update: There’s a new version with the slides and quotes, as requested by Noemi.
I’ll now work on the final design, roughly following the design proposal that we received. If anyone dislikes that proposal, or has specific requests what I should do how, now’s the last chance to tell
Note that I don’t plan to make this website a single-page site as in the design proposal. If you guys want to use it as the medium to long term web presence of The Reef, that would be too limiting I think.
I cannot get involved in the site design more, been following transversally and offering advice when something comes up. Hope it’s OK!
I do love how you added the photos and I think the filters are good, they are not too revealing of people’s faces. And all names are rightfully assigned to the photo and quotes, thank you for the care!
Another good photo to use here or elsewhere is this:
My 5 cents:
If a site layout would be more simple, based on these images, and simple background (the sides of the site etc.) I think it would look better than the green/brown combo from the official materials. There is always the option of using that imagery somewhere if and when needed, but it doesnt have to be the DONE visual brand, especially because none of us is hyper excited about them.
For the budget we had, it’s OK to have gotten something, but the work of a proper visual brand building will take longer, so not locking ourselves in a design I think is the smarter choice.
It’s also why I will not ask our video maker or anyone doing comms to use religiously the repository we have i.e. notice The Reef title sequence in the video with improvised font… :
I have just prepared all the topics belonging to thereef.brussels so that they are ready to take the translated content. Once the translations of one language are all in place there, I can switch on that language version on the thereef.brussels website.
Update: A new version of the website is online with major updates to the graphics, font formatting and site structure.
@alberto please have a look. Is that fit for purpose now? Any modification requests? Otherwise I’d consider the work done until I get the multilingual content to integrate.
Much much better, well done!!
The button on the homepage that says Connect to the community should probably link to The Reef category. Currently it links to Campfire…
Hello, I had a discussion with @noemi Noemi earlier this week about how easy it is to reach info about The Reef when searching for it online. One problem that I identified is that the website doesn’t really come up in the search results. Noemi encouraged me to write down my feedback. For context, I worked for several years as an SEO consultant. @matthias, I think this is of interest to you, since you seem to be handling the website.
I did a very fast SEO audit of the website.
Issues:
The site is indexed in Google but doesn’t come up as one of the results on the first 2 pages in google for search terms like ”the reef Brussels” or ”the reef edgeryders”.
When looking at which pages are indexed (just search in google site:https://thereef.brussels/) there are 8 pages indexed and the bottom 3 ones shouldn’t be there judging by the titles and meta descriptions:
For the pages that should be indexed, their titles and meta descriptions (the small snippets of texts under the title) are not really descriptive of what is in the page. The page in French has the meta data in English.
On the main page, the word ”Brussels” comes up only one time, somewhere at the bottom. Make sure to include it in more proeminent places, like subtitles.
Make sure to have as little text as possible only in the images, as that one doesn’t get indexed. If there is no workaround, just have the content of the text in the image as the image alt. This also helps with accessibility.
i was wondering about these points recently. great that you mention them,
we are publishing our content stories (like the ones I did with sabine and celine jamar), in this edgeryriders platform but I was wondering, are they indexed by search engines?
also, all the research we are doing with workshops and interviews, are “discovery sessions” that should give us good ideas for content we can create to attract visitors to the site.
In principle, our forum topics are well indexed. Right now, Google has indexed 5600 edgeryders.eu topics. Not sure when and how it will happen to any new topic, though.
And Google also provides us with quite some organic traffic – it’s not like it considers a forum “low quality” just because it’s a forum. So I think if you want to go for more organic traffic, it’s about finding out what people are searching for, and writing unique content for that.
I think that the research we are doing for the reef (workshops) and interviews can be used as discovery opportunity to find out what people are searching for in Brussels. and bring some inbound traffic to the reef web.
