If
you are a regular visitor then you've probably noticed that we made
some design changes yesterday afternoon. The transition went off
without a hitch thanks to The Open Planning Project's Anil Makhijani, Andy Cochran and Rob Marianski.
I just wanted to take a moment to walk you through the new design and
provide another opportunity for feedback here in the comments section.
- For Streetsblog, one of the big goals of the redesign was to make our San Francisco, Los Angeles and National Blog Networkweb sites more accessible. In the old design, links to these sites wereburied in our sidebar. Now you can find them via the tabs in theheader.
- You can still find handy links to the Comments, Calendar and Submit Contentpages up in the Streetsblog header as well. "Submit Content" used to becalled "Contribute" but we thought that it sounded too much like wewere asking for money (which we may be doing soon, but not yet). Fornow, we're just asking you to tag your links, photos and videos so wecan feature them here on Streetsblog. This is actually a reallyinteresting part of the web site if you haven't visited it before.
- In the thin header at the very top you may notice that the Livable Streets "Groups" site has been renamed "Community."We felt this better reflected our mission to help Livable Streetsactivists connect with each other, share information and resources, andgenerally become more aware of themselves as a growing nationalmovement. We've been steadily improving the Community features over thelast few months and really want to ramp that up in the coming months. Have you joined yet?
- Streetfilms and Streetswikihave remained pretty much the same, aside from the new header. I'd becurious to hear what people think we need to do with Streetswiki tomake it a more useful resource.
- You'll note that we've added Livable Streets Educationto the top nav bar as well. Run by Kim Wiley-Schwartz and RebeccaJacobs, the Education Project is starting to work in classroomsthroughout New York City to train the next generation of LivableStreets activists. This is a very cool program and we'll have a moredetailed post on it tomorrow.
- We are hearingsome people say that they miss seeing our logo depicting thesilhouetted street scene. We like it too but felt that it contributedto the site's header being a bit too busy and heavy. Forwhat it's worth, you can still find the logo on the Livable StreetsInitiative homepage. If there's enough of a popular outcry, perhaps wecan ask our designer Andy Cochran to figure out a way to bring it backto the other sites as well. (In addition, the L.A. Streetsblog logo can be found at the Los Angeles Streetsblog page on Facebook.)
That's
all for now. If you have any feedback on the new design or features
that you'd like to see us improving or developing, please leave a
comment or shoot us an email.
