[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.

[amcnea]

Also, I am lacking a clear cut understanding of what you want to happen. So far all I have gathered is that you want to create the “pieces” and to ignore the “site”. But I don’t know what pieces you want or what you want those pieces to look like.

If you say to me, “I want you to take that demo, and make an EE site which looks the exact same.” Well, I can do that. I can have that for you in about a week.
If you say to me, “I want you to take that paypal box on your demo and change the color schema to this.” Well, I can do that. I can have that for you in under a day.
If you say to me, “I want you to take this picture and turn into html and css.” Well, I can do that also.

But what I can’t do is take pieces and ignore the site, because I don’t know what that means.

I guess what I am saying is I would I like to help, and I would like to know exactly how I can help.

[amcnea]

Have you read Jeff Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards? I’ve adopted that philosophy.

Yes I have, but I have the second edition and it’s been a while since I have looked at it (I will have to wait till after the holidays and I get back home). But if recall correctly, I don’t think he talks very much about design flow, or the end user experience. These to me are probably the more important then standards or even readable code (not that I am saying that unreadable code or lack of standards is acceptable). Because this is what the end user see when they load a page. This deals with concepts like: Where is the eye drawn to when the page loads? What lines on the page does the eye follow? What information does this lead the eye too? What is the initial response to the color schema?

I don’t think we have to compromise on style, but it may be your approach to design is over-complicating things.

Hmm, I think that was uncalled for, but in the spirit of mutual cooperation I let this one slide.

Yes, in the css sheets, you start with the base css. Then, having decided on the different divs of your site, you add code necessary to differentiate them. It’s like cell differentiation.

Yes, this is the data that I have been asking for. That is exactly what I mean when I say designing the site. Has the div structure been defined? Has the base CSS been created? Are these decisions already made? If so where can I find them? All I have been saying is that these decision should be made first. And, that I need this information to competently create the “pieces” which will be pluged into this framework.

I don’t think the CSS and the layout of the current site should be the base CSS and layout for a new site. I think there should be a new structure, a new color schema, a new font schema, etc.

If you’re very concerned about straightjacketing the site and making sure things fit precisely into eachother, you’ll run into design problems. If you relax that standard, you have much more freedom.

In order to make things fit precisely one need not “straight jacket the site”. Precision is merely a consequence of understanding the code and understand how browser differentiate the displaying of that code. For example, under certain conditions it is common for IE to render with a 1px offset difference from how Firefox and Webkit renders. Now, if you are trying to make a straight line, this offset can kill the page design. 1px can be the difference between a page looking beautiful and a page looking like crap. There are many ways to do the same and still be in the w3c spec. Some of these this problem will show up, other ways it won’t.

But you have to start out with that approach in mind, otherwise you may code in some messy entangled code. And then you’re dependent on Joomla’s interface to fix things and out of touch with the complex code beneath it.

First off I have already given up on trying to get you to use joomla. Secondly I don’t really care about being out of touch with the “complex code” (Even though I am actually VERY familiar with the inner workings of Joomla). The majority of people don’t have a clue about the inner working of their car (such as engine, alternator, transmission, etc). But, that doesn’t mean that a person can not successfully use a car or have a beautiful car. And, it is very likely that a person will save considerable time, effort, and energy by buying a pre-made car instead of trying to design and build one themselves.

What I do care about is having a successful site which, 1) Looks professional, 2) Looks beautiful, 3) Shows relevant information in an easily understandable form, 4) Get people to come back, and most importantly 5) gets people to donate money.

Everything else is nothing more then a means to an end in my mind. If I have to be in touch with the complex code or simple code in order to fulfill my objective, then so be it. If not, then I am fine with that also.
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Anyway, I couldn’t figure out how Joomla codes that cool grey groove in the footer.

It’s an image assigned on the div class=”copyright-block” with the CSS as follows: (image is posted below)
background-attachment: scroll;
background-clip: border-box;
background-color: transparent;
background-image: url(http://75.17.88.183/templates/rt_nexus_j15/images/footer/dark/footer-div.png);
background-origin: padding-box;
display: block;
height: 89px;
margin-bottom: 15px;
margin-left: 0px;
margin-right: 0px;
margin-top: 15px;
width: 982px;
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Look, I am not trying to fight with you here or dictate to you how your site will be. But, I do this type of thing everyday. I have been doing this everyday for years. What I am trying to do is pass on the lessons I have learned to you. I have learned these lessons the hard way by wasting many many hours of my life learning them. I don’t wan’t you to have to go through same learning curve I went through. I want you to jump straight to the end, so that you can have an awesome site and not have to worry about it anymore. And you can do things which will be far more productive toward raising the funds to make fusion a reality

Attached files

[amcnea]

As to whole site redesign idea – that’s my point. Don’t think of the whole site, just of parts.

Hmm, the problem is that without a clear cut understanding of how the parts fit into the whole, it is very difficult to make a good looking well designed site. Things on a web-page follow a hierarchical schema. Where the CSS for the broad overview of the site such as general layout, background, etc. will permeate throughout the entire site. Then there will be sub-sections which will modify and append the CSS from the general form. Then there will be sub-sub-sections which modify and append CSS from the particular subsection.

To use a metaphor (ok, a simile), a web-site is like a pyramid. When you say we only need to design pieces, it’s like saying we only need to design the top of the pyramid. While this is by no means an impossible task, it is complicated if one doesn’t know the dimensions of piece that your trying to make. I mean, the top of a pyramid is just a much smaller pyramid. So, that in itself isn’t that hard. It’s that I don’t know the dimensions (base and height) of the small pyramid (top) which will cause it to sit on top of the large pyramid seamlessly. Hmm, did I go little to far with the analogy there?

Now, to give an example from the demo. Things like the font, link color, background, etc would be the base. Then the top black area would be one sub-section, followed by the blue sub-section, then there is the article sub-section below and to the left, a module sub-section below and to the right, and finally a footer sub-section at the bottom. Then in the module section there is a Paypal, login, and Photo sub-sub-sections.

If you start by designing the sub-sub-sections and work your way out to the broadest sections, then as you alter the code in the base area, this will change the appearance of EVERY sub-sub-section. Text starts to wrap, things get pushed off of where there supposed to be, etc. Then you have to go through and modify the CSS for each sub-sub-section to be compliant with the new base CSS. Furthermore all this is complicated by multi-browser support.

I incorporated your text in the “how green is it” section. I didn’t take the graphic ‘cause I don’t know if it’s creative commons or we’d need a license.

I that particular image is under the GNU or Lesser GPL. It can be found at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nuvola_apps_important_recycle.png. It say’s on the page the it is under the GNU. This didn’t make much sense to me so I did a little more digging and found that the picture is an icon from the “Nuvola icons” which is a Theme for KDE 3 (KDE 3 being a linux based Graphics User Interface, so basically an alternative windows). Anyways, what all this means is that the image should be good for use.

Now, should I go back to the ee site and put down a higher pay offer with the disclaimer that actually we’re paying nothing? Or would they feel lured under false pretenses? Which is worse, to be insulted, or to be lured? Ah.

I don’t know, I am not really a fan of insulting or luring people. Can’t you just say that your a non-profit and what your looking for?

[amcnea]

So, given that no one knows expression engine around here, I just posted a job on the ee sites.

I downloaded the Expression Engine Core 1.6.8 today, and it doesn’t look very difficult and I don’t have a problem with learning it. I also don’t have a problem with designing the site for free. The problem which I have with EE is that it seems far more difficult to make a complete redesign of the site.

For instance that Demo which I made took me about 8-10 hours of work with probably about 2-3 hours just spent on the top logo. The rest of the time was spent searching for the template, finding the appropriate modules, cropping the other images, searching for images on google, and copy and pasting info into the site. I probably spent less then 1 hour actually working on the site layout, color schema, and things of that nature.

With EE it seems to me like the site layout, color schema, etc. will take far longer then it does with Joomla. Probably on the time scale of a week instead of an hour. My concern would be investing a week into a site layout only to hear at the end “we don’t like this, that, and the other thing. Do it over.” Which isn’t very uncommon in the web-site design game. With Joomla if something like that happens, I haven’t lost very much. With EE the loss seems to be far grater.

How we usually handle this is by pairing off with an artist. We have the client talk to the artist who conceptualizes the website and makes the layout. This is usually stored in an image or PDF of EXACTLY how the website will look. Once this image has been created and approved by the client then the PDF is handed to a developer such as myself. The developer then takes the PDF and turns into the final web-site. This process generally cost somewhere between $5,000 to $20,000 depending on complexity and time. I don’t usually go this route, but my brother has done this sort of thing on his spare time. He has gone through a site called lucky dog or something like that.

Now, just for a joomla site which takes me about 5-8 days to set up, get approval for, etc. I will usually charge about $2,000 to $4,000 per site.
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Anyways, I would be hesitant to go through the effort of creating an EE site without knowing EXACTLY how you want the site to look like. A possible solution to this would be to make the site in joomla initially until you have something that you want to go live with. And the Joomla site can then act as the PDF file generated by the artist. I can then take that and turn it into the EE site as previously discussed.

My guess is that you will run into this same hesitation about site-layout for any EE designer. Especially for the price you offered. Because a single redo of the site could basically eat up the entire budget.

[amcnea]

The problems I am guessing will come up is that when you are parsing out the html (and taking sub-sections of HTML), that those sub-sections will have CSS dependent upon the parent sections. Hence, it may take good understand of the HTML and the CSS in it’s entirety in order to parse it. I might just be overly worried and this problem might not even exist, but it something that I would be looking for.

Furthermore, the same CSS is going to apply to various different places in the HTML, which may be modified by other CSS dependent on structure, and other files might override previous CSS. Anyways, trying to figure all that out will be annoying at best. Also, a large portion of the CSS will be completely irrelevant to what is being displayed because Joomla is created to be heavily modifiable.

Perhaps if you just load in all of the joomla CSS files, then maybe everything will just work magically.

Then there will be options from the CMS which will be fed into things like the CSS and the Javascript. For instance the blue thing which rotates is set to change once every 10 secs, however, this is just an option in Joomla which can be changed to anything or turned off. Within the joomla system, these options are easy to find and modify, but I have no clue how deeply these options are hidden in the Javascript files which are sent to the end user.

Those are the concerns that I have off hand. I guess I just feel a little apprehension about cutting and pasting from joomla to EE because it is the approach that I know the least about and has the highest number of unknowns. I have moved joomla CMS to Drupal CMS before, and from Drupal to Joomla. I have also integrate Joomla with SugarCRM before (genesis site) in a manner similiar to that outlined in part 3 of my previous post.

But, I don’t have a problem with giving this approach a try.
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Before I forget, I noticed on a previous post your EE script started off with:

This will probably need to be changed to what joomla uses, which is:

[amcnea]

EE uses a lot of “templates” – but in a different sense from Joomla.

Hmm, maybe I am just not seeing things right (I still haven’t download EE yet), but when I run a google search for “Expression Engine Template” (No Quotes), I get pages such as the following:

http://expressionengine.com/templates/themes/category/site_themes/
http://www.nikhedonia.com/notebook/entry/6-brand-new-templates-for-expression-engine/

And these seem to be showing me templates in the joomla sense of the word. I am also seeing the words “theme” and “site-theme” used synonymously.

So, yes. Just need the css and html.

Anyways, as for parsing out the CSS and the HTML, this seems like far to much work (at least for my standard, but I live by a code of laziness). Might I suggest a few alternatives to this approach.

1) The easy route is probably to get a template (in the joomla sense of the word) for expression engine such as the items listed above. However, those templates arn’t that great and finding a really good one might take some time.

2) If you really like the joomla templates, try to move everything into a joomla template. (I know you don’t like this option, I only list it for purposes of being thorough.)

3) If you really like the joomla templates, create a hybridized site. From what I have observed, the login and password for the Expression Engine system is only relevant to the forums. The main FFS website really has nothing to do with the user login system. So, replace the website with a joomla site. Have the forums link on the “Joomla site” point to the “Expression Engine Forums”. Then, alter the login script on the “Joomla Site” so that the following will happen:
Upon attempting to login in
A) Log the user into the Expression Engine Site.
B) If (A) is successful, Log the user into the Joomla Site
C) If (B) failed, then pull the user registration info from the Expression Engine Database, and create a new Joomla Account for the user, and log him in.
Note: The user registration section would also have to be altered to simultaneously register a user into joomla and expression engine.

Option 3 has the advantages of being able to use the Joomla Templates without all the hassle of dissecting joomla, and you can use the joomla back-end for managing the site. Also this allows the forums, and user accounts to remain intact. While duplicating the accounts into the new system at the point of login. Which means no sensitive information has to be given to the developer.

[amcnea]

So…by all means, give it to me as css and html. The css would go into, say “styles/footer” and the html into “bits/footer”, and they’d be called in with the embeds.

I guess I am not exactly sure what you are trying to do. Are you trying to pull the html and css from the joomla template, and insert it into Expression Engine?

[amcnea]

I would say from my experience that the W3C standard is of trivial importance when actually designing a site. I would say it’s more of W3C suggestions then standards. This is because Microsoft IE 6&7;(& probably 8) are NOT W3C compliant and IE has about 70% market share. Although it is probably a good idea to keep your pages close to the W3C spec, I wouldn’t break my back over it.

I would say that it is FAR more important to break up you files into HTML and CSS. But this is generally already done with these templates.

Anyways, for anyone who want’s you can check the demo site @ http://75.17.88.183/. However, the site is on my laptop and is NOT at a permanent location. So, if you can’t connect to it that’s why. All I can say is try again later.

[amcnea]

Of course, I’m thinking about FFS as a nonprofit organization with a mission. You’re thinking about investors in the LPP experiment – a for profit endeavor. It’s a similar thing.

What exactly is the relationship between FFS and LPP? If this is already discussed somewhere can you point me to it please?

Now, the only problem with this that I see is that “micro-investors” or, non-accredited investors who want to chip in funds to the experiment, will get nothing back from their investment. They can only donate. So, this tends to discourage people from donating. Let the big fish be a free rider on my dime! Hah! Let them come up with the whole thing. This issue has always bugged me.

Can something be done about this? I don’t know what the law is or how this can be handled but here is a hypothetical. Could FFS collect micro-investments from registered users, and hence keep information about 1) the Micro-Investor and 2) the amount invested. FFS Could then group this money together into amounts large enough such that shares of LPP could be bought @ $50 per share. Finally FFS could have a broker whom is an “accredited investor” and can purchase the shares from LPP.

Would that be realistic? Or is there just to much red tape to actually do something like this?

As for doing the tracking the users and amounts invested, this can be done easily with paypal. It is called IPN or Instant Payment Notification, and paypal will automatically contact your server whenever a payment is made. Anyways, I have written code to do this about 2 or 3 times now, and it isn’t that hard. I went ahead a found some stuff on Paypal IPN and ExpressionEngine. It says it can do it using off the shelf parts: http://expressionengine.com/docs/modules/simple_commerce/sc_cp_ipn.html

[amcnea]

Just be careful you stick to the rules about who you can seek funding from.
The last thing we want is a distracting legal case to fight.

Umm, what rules? And where can they be located?

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