To the Diy Drones Community from Joshua Johnson:
Which proposed improvements do you like? Which ones do you dislike? Do you have your own ideas on improvements that would put Diy Drones ahead of Rc Groups and add more resources for the community? Please share and collaborate this is a perfect time for the community to help shape and evolve this community in something even better!!!!
My List of Proposed Improvements for DiyDrones.com:
- Change background to black to fit in with the top banner and make the website more appealing but keep the very bottom of the website that displays the copyrights, who created the website, etc just a plain background. Editing the color text scheme so that links don't get lost will take 30-60 mins to fully sift through. )
- Add eye catching content to the home page like the High Tech Revolving Visitor globe that I embedded into the Diy Drones News Center! (Members will have access to website statistics to use for personal and business purposes)
- Add a Poll Center page and HTML embed a 3rd Party polling encoder to allow the community to vote on key issues and hot topics ( Maintain this section constantly adding new polls that the community will find useful and interesting at the same time )
- Instead of Video's add a Menu called: Diy Drones and the Drop down menu should include Options such as: Facebook(Linking members to the Diy Drones Facebook), Twitter (Linking members to the Diy Drones Twitter), News(Linking people to the Diy Drones News center I created), Groups(All Groups Link), And Rules(The Diy Drones Website Rules).
- Setup schedule to change 100 photo carousel (Same Day each month) at the top of the home page with 100 new photos and maybe even set up a contest where we take a poll and embed in a Diy Drones Poll Center and allow the community to vote on a winner and the winner each month will receive a prize based on the highest number of votes
- Video's and Photos should be pulled off the menu list and put into the Members drop down menu. Also the Members Drop down menu could be decked out with tons of features that can assist the members in different ways of engaging ( Could be links to the Diy Drones Skype Chat Group, an IRC Chat could have its own page and link in the members drop down menu which won't cause any lag for the website and will allow members alternative ways to engage. )
- Change Store to 3DR Store ( When someone is brand new to a website and they click on store to check out products getting sent to a different website usually makes people uncomfortable or people sometimes assume they got sent to a fraudulent website so changing the name to 3DR Store will give people a pre warning on where you intend on sending them )
- Getting Started Menu should be renamed For Beginners and should include like 10-15 drop down options ( This drop down menu should include a link to the website currently being developed by a Diy Drones Member that is map based that allows people to implement their local legislation's and laws concerning drones to a map. Also links to websites like the Academy of Model Aeronautics and any other useful Diy Drones or non Diy Drones pages that beginners would find useful )
- Forum drop down menu could have some important forum topics added and changed each month of discussions that the community deems important ( If something like the 3DR IRIS is a hot top that month create a page or link a current page to a new drop down menu option under Forum )
- Blogs Drop down menu should be the same thing as the Forum with links directly to important Blogs that are still hot topics or are of importance to the community ( Use this drop down menu to showcase the top blogs/news of the month that members would deem important. This could be updated weekly or monthly. )
- ArduPlane, ArduCopter, and ArduRover drop down menus should all be jam packed with useful links to pages, discussions, blogs, or website pages that are important or pertain to these menu subjects. ( The drop down menus could have minor schedule updating by a member of the Diy Drones Team with new links that members would deem important. )
- MyPage drop down menu could include links to MyGroups, MyFriends, MyDiscussions, MyBlogs, Etc
Comments
My one suggestion is NO black background. If every website on the internet had a black background, it would be more tolerable but after I read even one article on a page and switch to another with a white background, it completely messes with my head and actually bothers my eyes quite a bit. I'm not even that old!
Not moderating the hell out of the blogs & a search engine that works would be required. RCgroups is pretty open, but they're not accountable to a single company like diydrones, where 1 off topic blog post can show up in a quarterly report. They're search engine doesn't work either. Search engines are still a tough problem for the human race.
@Everyone, If anyone wants to check out the functionality of the revolving visitor globe I have it embedded on the Diy Drones News Center page!
@Everyone who is bringing up Forums; I added a forum only search engine for the DiyDrones Forum on my website http://diydronesnews.com/ until Ning 3 rolls out you folks might find using my search engine more useful when searching for specific things within the forums.
@Tom Finn, I have to take a lot of the blame for the lack of organized/scheduled changing of things like Feature Content and the photo carousel on the front page. I used to do a lot of things on DiyDrones with an objective in mind but when I stepped down as an Admin I should of went through my daily, weekly, and monthly scheduled website schedules and provided all the details to everything I had my hands in so others could take over my duties but I failed miserably at that.
@Tom, I agree about the forum once again Ning 3 is supposed to work some magic with that. @Harry less will become more and featuring the really cool content and keeping it more sticky will be a goal. Some great stories fall off the front page quickly sometimes and many members don't get to see it.
Don't overcomplicate it or think that if you want to jumble it all up with junk, then millions will suddenly flock. It's a subset market and it likes meaty cutting edge content. Talk about your project that puts Arducopter on an FPGA and makes it run faster and more accurately on an octocopter while controlling a target tracking camera and cooperating in a swarm and you get interest from around the world.
Oh one more suggestion to the front page. Remove the feature box. The content is not updated often enough in there and it makes the page look stale always having the same content in there for months. That is prime real-estate being wasted on stale content.
I would suggest a better forum system so its easier to find threads/posts, keep track of threads/posts, etc. The current forum system is not that friendly and is very difficult to follow threads that get big. I think the current forum system gets in the way of the community when it should be supporting the community.
Something like... vBulletin, IP Boards, Xenforo, heck even phpBB would be better than what is here now.
That said I like the front page news and pretty much the only reason I visit diydrones at the moment.
I definitely wouldn't want DIYDrones to take after RCGroups.
RCGroups is a great site that has helped me on numerous occasions. But it is vast and very general. You can't just browse for the new posts and find each thing more-or-less interesting.
When I power the laptop up each morning I expect to get the RSS feed from DIYDrones Blog and read subjects about the community, hardware, software and legislature of the UAV world. Extending the membership to cover other interests will simply mess that up.
These are my 2 cents.
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