[open-literature] A Fresh Look at the Open Shakespeare Website

[Rufus Pollock]

Wow this is *amazing*, a huge thank-you to Alex Lee. Perhaps we should
put these comments in their own separate pad at:
<http://okfnpad.org/openshakespeare-website>

Some comments inline below. My suggestion is we start out focusing
completely on the front page and work outwards from there ...

Rufus

On 4 August 2010 12:36, Open Shakespeare <open-shakespeare at okfn.org> wrote:
[...]
> Without further ado:

@All (and James in particular): a bunch of the site and especially the
front-page is now directly editable in word-press, just find the
"welcome to ..." page and start editing.

> * If you dig around, there's a huge amount of data in the site, but
> the front page doesn't make this obvious. I'd suggest a clearer page
> with the main calls to action and surface more content from deeper in
> the site. The 'word of the day' for example could pull in the first 20
> words of the article as a tease into the content. You could show a
> random work or latest annotations.
>
> * The big wordle image doesn't make much sense without a title (I
> worked out what is from from the alt tag), and it doesn't link
> anywhere so looks more like it's just filling space.

He is quite right. I just shoved this in quickly on the w/e to show we
could now alter the front page from wordpress ...

> * 'Works' page  could be separated out a little nicer with anchored
> links by alphabet or allow filtering by date or type (tragedy, comedy
> etc)
>
> * The introductions are fantastic, and actually hold links to useful
> content (such as the editions links) could the introduction be
> included above / alongside the work? Make the work the focal page and

By work do you mean "text" of work or am I missing something here.

> then have sub pages/views which are 'annotate', 'introduction',
> 'editions/downloads' for example.
>
> * The annotations is also a great feature, could this be surfaced
> higher up or highlight recent annotations from the homepage? How much
> annotating do you want people to do? Is that a core part of the
> project, or not really?

It is core, and we should definitely surface annotations higher up. In
fact showing most recent annotations is on the todo list (but requires
some changes to annotation structure).

> * When I clicked into an annotation there were lots of 'test
> annotations' so they could do with a bit of a clear out.

Agreed.

> * Highlighting works that are in need of attention, or are very active
> could be another way to draw people into the project
>
> * A simple one is that search should really be in the header of every page

Yep!

> * Slight tangent but could you surface timely content? Passages which
> discuss the current month or season? Maybe something that could tie
> into word of the day.

I think we could extend word of the day into a shakespeare
thought/snippet of the day ...

> * Or could you do anything with http://theatricalia.com/ to promote
> the works by showing productions? Just a random thought.

Yes, and in fact I spoke with Matthew Somerville specifically about OS
and theatricalia stuff a while back ...

> * And finally, the title of the homepage is 'Open Shakespeare Blog' I

This is being set by import of data from wordpress. Will fix this.

> am little confused though, because I can't find any blog content.

It's at /news/ which could be renamed to blog i think ...