Thinking through a website refresh

[mrchrisadams]

Okay, here's what I'm thinking.

What's left

• i18n make sure the german strings sound okay
• check with about the wording in the two sign up forms
• decide about the links to current off site content (i.e the slide decks linked on the site, like this one for NGOs, and this one for volunteers )

Goals

Make it easier to:

• see how what we do:
  • helps data scientists who want to do something socially useful
  • helps non-profits who want get better at using data in their organisation
• express interest in working with us
• find out about future things we do, if a visitor isn't ready right now to work with us

Signals that would show people doing this

Concrete ways we'd support the goals above, that we could measure easily would be:

• applying to be a volunteer (i.e. follow a link a google form, as it doesn't rely on the person writing an email from scratch)
• register interest in working with us as an NGO (linking to a form again, for the reasons above)
• sign up for our a newsletter (email still is likely to give us the highest engagement rate, compared to tweeting, or writing a blog post on medium for example)

Sketching this out

Here's what I'm thinking at the mo, I'll explain a few bits:

• introduce clear calls to action to work with us or volunteer
• have a large header, explaining what DSSG actually means, with a photo from one of our events,
• have an all english page, or an all german page - not the mix right now
• list the 2 or three events happening, linking to the corresponding page, sign up link for them
• keep the pictures of the current team, so volunteers and ngos have faces to put to the DSSG org

[mrchrisadams]

yo @kirel, can you add me and @thenaturalist to the DSSG repo?

[mrchrisadams]

Okay, we've got a rough version of this here now

https://nifty-bartik-2380ba.netlify.com/

The corresponding repo and branch is here
https://github.com/mrchrisadams/dssg-berlin.github.io/tree/website_redesign

[mrchrisadams]

The correct PR for this is PR 10 on the dssg repo:

#10

[mrchrisadams]

For deployment we have two main options.

#### Use Netlify

It's a free service, you get a CDN, and SSL and it will run compilation server side.

https://www.netlify.com

It's already set up, for the dev site, so we would tell it to deploy from master, then update the DNS. That's it.

Use GIthub pages and have some way to handle deploying when changes are made.

Github pages works by either using jektll, or deploying whatever is in the gh-pages branch of a repo.

More here - look for Deployment of Project Pages From Your gh-pages branch

https://gohugo.io/hosting-and-deployment/hosting-on-github/#github-project-pages

We would need a deploy script to run locally, or rely on travis to run a deploy script whenever new code is pushed to maser. I think @thenaturalist has already set up travis to generae code, as a kind of 'build check' for the source , so we'd need to adapt the travis script to then either check in the generated HTML code to the gh_pages branch, or something similar.

@kirel can you let me know which you're happier with doing? Of the two options, netlify seems the simpler one, is free, and is more aimed at making it easier to update public facing websites, built the way static site generators build sites(see https://www.netlifycms.org)