A society for atheists, rationalists, secularists and humanists
The observant of you may have noticed that the website is looking a little different today. Not massively but sufficently, it's like a fresh lick of paint really though there are a few more changes when you scratch the surface. As such, I'm going to discuss the thinking about the makeover and go through what has been changed.
The website has gone through some quite major changes since it was first launched in 2006. It began life in the summer of that year when the society was just starting and months before it was finally ratified by the union. To date however these have all been to the content of the site, we've added a lot, created the members area and made it far more interactive. The design has remained constant though while in the outside world, technology moved on.
The first change then is that the site is now quite a bit wider when it used to be. The original site was designed to fit in an 800x600 screen because that was fairly common back then and people may be starting to look at it on portable devices. These days people have much bigger monitors and we don't need to worry about people using phones or handhelds because the site has an alternative version for them (just open it in your phone and you'll see the site looks different) so the site is now designed to fit in a 1024x768 screen.
It is a bit more graphics heavy now as well. Almost everyone is on broadband these days so we can make the site look a little prettier without affecting load times too much. After all, when it comes down to it, we're all about style in A-Soc ;).
Next, the site navigation has been played around with. The tab system at the top is the same but we the links themselves have changed. Each page in the site is now sectioned into one of these days and when you go into that section a submenu appears down the right. This is because as the site content expanded we needed a better way to navigate round without having just a list of pages down the right hand side as we used to have.
The final big change is that our upcoming events are now listed down the right hand side. We wanted to make it easier to find the information you were looking for when you arrived on the site and finding out what events we have on has to be high on that list so you can now see all the events we are running for the next seven days in the menu box.
There are a few other changes too. For example, with the events archive you can now browse by academic year rather than just a big long list of all previous events. The photo galleries are also paged too both in the list of albums and when there are lots of photos in one album.
All this should hopefully make the site easier to use and navigate and make it easier and faster to find the information you want. I'll love to hear your feedback on the site so if you have any thoughts then please drop me an email and let me know what you think.
The remaining updates to the website have gone live today. Most of this is backend tools to allow the committee to manage the society but we also have big changes for members too.
You can now join online and log into your members' account which gives you access to your profile and the members directory!
Our new website has now officially launched! We're still working on it and there will be some more changes before September but for now I will talk about the changes that we have already made.
New features: we have a photo gallery! With photos from some of our best events over previous years that will bring back lots of memories for our long standing members, I know they did for me.
We also have the store launched now so if you fancy a t-shirt or hoodie then head over there.
Improved features: we've added an RSS feed for our events which you can find on our all new RSS feeds pagge which links to the new and easier, more memorable URLs.
We've rewritten the about us page and added loads of new information about the society. We've now got links going all over the place too to things such as our Facebook group and Secular Portal.
Indeed we have rewritten most of the site and updated all the page content to bring it up to date.
We're currently working on re-doing the website given that summer is upon us and we will have a fresh intake of students joining the society in September.
The new website will not really change design wise, we won't be altering the layout or design too much, we will more be playing with the content as that is the most important part after all.
The new site will focus on providing more information on what the society actually does and will feature a few more rich media sections too. We'll keep you posted on development.
First of all the provisional timetable for Rationalist Week 2008 is now online! This will probably change a bit as we haven't got into the full swing of planning meetings with the whole society yet but we have a complete timetable provisionally (not all of it has been announced yet).
Along those lines, our first guest speaker, Mike Lake has now be confirmed. Anyone who was here last year will remember Mike gave a fantastic talk back in April so it's great news he has agreed to come up once more.
More details will hopefully be coming soon. We will be having a meeting before the end of term for people wanting to get involved and if anyone is around over Easter there will be some planning meetings too.
Norm's talk on social evolution is now available as a video for the people that missed the talk - head over to the videos section of the website to watch.
We've run into some real downtime problems recently so we've now moved to a new, hopefully more stable web server. So major downtime should be a thing of the past.
Atheist Week is going well. If you have missed a lot of it - don't worry! It's all going on YouTube.
With that in mind we have now launched our new video library which lists all of the videos we have now uploaded categorised into various topics.
Head over to the videos page to check it out. There are plenty more videos from Atheist Week on their way.
The informational page for Atheist Week is finally online. It details the various events that are going on including the specific talks and other events, where they are, what time, etc.
I've now posted a page about the weekend away in November where we will be going down to London this year.
The page contains information about the weekend, an outline of the schedule (which we are still putting together) and a few other details on the trip. It will be updated as we get more information sorted.
If you haven't heard about the weekend away you're missing out - it's a bargain weekend in London, we have a train booked to take us there and back and accommodation right in the centre of the city.
It's open to everybody (though members get a big discount) so you can bring your friends along as all the A-Soc activites we are organising are optional.