Our “Website Content” project team sat together tonight to discuss some recent website related developments.
The team currently currently consists of Oxy, Reservoir dog and Useless, but also present tonight were Spike Himself as Project Lead and Lyrete as News Writer.

Some questions on tonight’s agenda were:

• What to put on Team pages?
• What to display on the ‘old’ Teams page?
• Besides Reditio’s results and fixtures being on the front page, where do we display those of the community teams?
• What should be shown on user profile pages?

All these questions (and more!) were discussed thoroughly, and quite a number of actions have been added to the to-do list.

Let’s dive in!

Upcoming Fixtures and Recent Results

Currently the front page only displays matches of e-sports teams that we support. As we’re all well aware, at this time there is only our TF2 team, so the lists will not be massively populated for a while yet. We do also want to display this data for our community teams, but we weren’t sure where or how. The members of this meeting were asked how to deal with this, and the following has been decided:

First of all, there must be a general Results and Fixtures archive. A page where all results can be found, and likewise for all fixtures. To this end, the widgets on the front page will each have to show a ‘Show all’ link, which will take you to each respective archive page.

Community teams’ results and fixtures will be included in the widgets on the front page, at least until we have other teams to keep these lists more regularly updated.

Each team (community included) gets their own page which displays only their results and fixtures.

End result being that we will have 3 different formats of displaying results and fixtures:

• Very few ‘recent’ items in the widgets on the front page
• An archive page for results and one for fixtures, where all data can be found
• A page for results and one for fixtures for each team, showing only that team’s data

Hub page per team

Instead of having a page for Members, one for Results, one for Fixtures, etc. as was originally the plan, in this meeting we decided that all this information can be displayed on one and the same page (per team). This introduces the Team Hub page.
To keep things short, a team hub page will display:

• Team Avatar and Name
• Some basic information about the team, such as when it joined TC, where they currently are skillwise, etc.
• Logistical information about the team, such as who the leader is, what classes the members play, etc.
• A table displaying Upcoming Fixtures and one displaying Recent Results

The ‘old’ Teams page

The old teams page that shows all the teams and their members in one giant table is rendered obsolete, as all team and member data is moved to a hub page for each team. For structural reasons the Teams page will continue to exist though, as it parents each team’s hub page, so what do we do with this page?
A solution was quickly discovered: The page will display team names and avatars (and perhaps an excerpt of the team’s description), each entity being a link to the respective team’s hub page.

User profile page

For those not yet aware, each member of our website has their own publically viewable profile page (here’s an example). Currently there isn’t much (i.e. any) useful information there, and we want to change that.
Ideas were plenty, so here’s the list of things we are looking to display on the profile pages:

• Name
• Avatar
• Overview of published news posts
• Overview of comments on news posts
• Link to Steam profile
• Team or list of teams this person is a member of
• Any special roles this person has in any teams, in the community, or on the website

Comments

When you comment on a news post, currently your avatar and name will be shown, but they aren’t clickable. We’re looking to vastly improve the comments section in the very near future, by changing the following:

• Make your avatar and name link to your profile page
• Concisely show to the general public who you are, by for example adding your team name(s) below your avatar, and displaying your title within the community

Miscellaneous

Another point that was brought up was a request to increase the font size in some places (for example the author name and publish date above a news post). This will be amended shortly.

That’s all, folks!

This was the first ‘serious’ meeting the Website Content project team have had, and it has turned out very successful. We raced through the questions and came up with concrete ideas and actions (in only an hour!). Thank you very much for that!

There is no special restriction as to who can be in this project team. While we do want to keep the team relatively small (for the sake of quick and ‘powerful’ meetings), anyone is welcome to bring in their 2 cents (or more if you wish, but we have a donations page for that. Oh actually, we don’t, but you can still use paypal at team-colonslash dot eu! :D). If you have good ideas regarding our website that you want to share and you want to be a part of our meetings, please do contact Spike on steam!

Thanks for reading and until next time! <3