OfficerCadet Portal Mock-up

[dawg]

Hiya,

Right, this the sort of thing I was thinking of for a website "front door".

You've got space on the top and bottom bars for text and marquees...

The arrays of "Adpiclinks", are clickable links to the sites shown... I believe the traffic from links to and fro will increase the position of the site in google searches; and will lend credibility to the site IMO.

Many of these sites don't really have a lot of content in, but are ones that people can wander onto when first looking for careers info.

Hopefully, some banner exchanging can take place, which will also help increase membership and hitrates.
These "hoardings" could be replaced with clickstream revenues to help make the site pay for itself.

I wanted to integrate an anchor into the logo, but it'll have to wait.

Multiple domains would be useful to manage bandwidth and funnel searches. The blog and gallery can be normal free online things like blogger and flickr.

As for the wiki, I'll look into setting up MediaWiki with a nice nautical skin.

Please give some feedback and tell me what you think.

cheers.

[CharlieDelta]

Re: OfficerCadet Portal Mock-up

Actually, having seen it, I like. Working late today, will try to catch you later.

[size4riggerboots]

Re: OfficerCadet Portal Mock-up

Tis purdey

[dawg]

Re: OfficerCadet Portal Mock-up

Phew!

I was conscious of not wanting it to be too "busy". (I'll redo the central logo with the anchor wedged into it somehow to make it obviously nautical). I think I can make an agreeable wiki skin to match... perhaps it might be possible to make a matching forum skin (careful typing ) too .

The way I see it is that with all these logos and things, they can be changed later, it's not a problem - I'm not precious about them.

I just think that we would benefit from getting something up and running. We can then talk about changes and redesigns later.

I want visitors to arrive and think, ah, this is a decent looking site... could be useful... I'll register.

In the same way people will come to the forum to get answers to questions they maybe can't get elsewhere, I want to use the wiki as bait - they can't get access unless they sign up. So I would like to see a "global site login" for forum and wiki (maybe gallery too); the blog could be open to enable it to come up on google search results.

It's all mainly about getting the numbers up.

[kayak]

Re: OfficerCadet Portal Mock-up

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension ... ntegration

That help at all?

[dawg]

Re: OfficerCadet Portal Mock-up

thanks. I've got a few pages open... just need time to digest them.

PMwiki does have features that Mediawiki doesn't have (offline wiki; forum software; graphviz...) which I really like.
I use it like a lab book, on a memory stick or desktop to keep notes in entirely offline.
Mediawiki has some benefits, and I'll have to analyse the tables on http://www.wikimatrix.org to see what are the most useful features for this site (based on what I think people are expecting it to do).


I'm looking at these:
http://paulgu.com/wiki/Mediawiki_Skins
http://www.wikihow.com/Create-a-MediaWi ... om-Scratch
http://mediawiki2u.com/
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Skins
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... n_page.png
Not sure if it's the best for skins really... I suppose I could just throw up a watery background, a logo, and the normal wikipedia one (monobook)... but then I could do that with PMwiki, and it's already installed!

[The H]

Re: OfficerCadet Portal Mock-up

I like the design idea

[dawg]

Re: OfficerCadet Portal Mock-up

Tikiwiki & Mindtouch look the most suitable... I've used Tikiwiki before.
http://info.tikiwiki.org/tiki-index.php
http://www.mindtouch.com/
Mediawiki lacks a thing called ACL, and a couple of other features that the above two have.

On balance, Tikiwiki is probably the best free wiki software at the moment (especially for this project); Mindtouch is a bit commercially-orientated really.

I'll look into it, and come up with a timescale for implementation.

I do remember that it's a bit more fiddly to set up though...

The features are great, but the user manual, although extensive and in English, makes bugger all sense to me!

Here's the default TikiWiki theme I'll probably testdrive:
http://irc.tikiwiki.org/irclogger_log/t ... -10-11,Sat