Reply To: Fantastic news.

[amcnea]

1) Come up with a color palette.
2) Choose fonts, sizes and colors for the basic elements, e.g., h1, h2, h3, h4; p, quotes, bullets, and variations of those in sub categories.

Ok, this looks like a good place to start. Do you like the schema from the demo site. If so I can just use that as the basis and port it over to EE. If not, what sort of colors do you like?
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Structure – I’m fine with your basic header, nav band, some columns (2-4, depending) and a footer. Or, a folded page, with more segments as you go down. Do you have any structural, div related suggestions?

Alright, I will port that over then.
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Anyway, more on divs, but too much to write. I’ll call you. Let me know a good time.

Hmm, things are starting to get really busy at the moment. Perhaps after Christmas sometime. My sister gave birth yesterday to two little girls (Hannah, and Avery. Hope I spelled those correctly.) She is getting home from the hospital on Friday at which time I assume I will be changing diapers, listening to constant crying, and banging my head against the wall. I don’t know for sure though, they were really quite at the hospital, but they probably weren’t used to taking in big lung fulls of air and letting out shrieking cries. I assume they have and will be practicing.

So, I need to try to finish that horizon steel building site before Friday, and I will be busy with that for a little while.

Anyways, I’ll let you know when things calm down and we can set up a time to talk.
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navigation – But we’re still figuring out the navigation of the site. That’s an info arch issue, right? Anyway, I do like that treehugger.com approach with info/interact/act.

i’m ok with the breaking it up into things like info/interact/act as general categories. We might be able to do better once we figure out the persona stuff, but those are good. However, I didn’t like how the top nav bar was actually displayed. The grid of links just didn’t do it for me. But what I really really did like about the tree hugger site was the area to right of the blog section that you can click and it would take you to the next blog entry.
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According to the Redish book, we have to start with creating “persona”s – what is the typical person looking for on our site.

Just of the top of my head I would say people are looking for 1) Information, 2) How to help, and 3) How to donate.
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I also had an idea about donating or more accurately I remembered a TED talk about how to get people to shell out more cash. Anyways, perhaps we can try implementing something based off the ideas outline here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X68dm92HVI
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And finally, I was wondering if it would be possible to set up a second EE site on the Focus Fusion server. Something that is completely independent of the current site. Something that can server as a sand box or test bed. A central place where we (and any developers who come on board) can both have admin access to the EE site and upload/store our code to and make changes without effective the main site. Also a place where others can look at the new site and make suggestions.

Then after everything looks nice and is good to go, you can just simply move everything from the sandbox to the main site.

If this can’t be done on the focus fusion server, I might be able to talk someone into letting us do this on their server. Anyways, let me know.