after much longer than expected my elgg based site is nearing an alpha stage of completion. if you are looking for inspiration you are welcome to explore what i am creating; i am always open to feedback and you are certainly welcome to joyn the community.
presently the functionality of the site focuses on being an information system for sharing & healing, rather than primarily being a commerce system or some other type of website.
the elgg groups are called 'zones' and the blogs are called 'thoughts'. the 'thoughts' replace the 'discussions' so the main method of sharing text and using 'forums' is via the 'thoughts'.
i am using many community plugins and regularly expand the functions and sometimes create my own. the theme has been developed by just me alone, over many months.... i started with elgg 1.7.4.
as yet the site is not optimised for phones and other optimisations will come soon too. presently only the english version is online.
in-joy
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i real-eyesed a while ago that luck is essentially 'light' (lux).. so thankyou for your wish of beneficial light! ;)
do you have any comments on the site? on style, function, speed or anything at all?
if you search the content you will find:
and a whole lot more..
ideally everyone already knows about all this stuff.. at this point my experiences show me otherwise.. ah well.. oneward!
Just installed elgg and yours is the first site I saw ! Nice and wish you the best! I am just learning - difficult as I don't know programming.. will be thank ful for all help asI go along....
thanks for the comments. :)
the theme has been evolving as i go and has gone through various stages and colours.i chose a dark theme to reduce eye glare and also use less screen/monitor electric current than the white pages do.
from there i wanted to include the spectrum of colours since i am aware of the necessity of integrity and total self inclusion for healing to occur; the full spectrum reflects this - (though most of us are not thinking this way exactly presently). so that creates a challenge of how to integrate all colours on a page without being overpowering.
i agree that the colours were a bit dark and 'murky' overall, so i have increased the brightness and changed some of the tones of various elements. i still have some way to go..
i made a lot of electronic music previously and tuning the colours of a mostly static site is a bit like perfecting one moment in a song.. an interesting experiment!
i will continue tweaking and balancing the frequencies of colour.. the site is easier on the eye now anyhow - i also rotated the background colours to give a view that is more consistent with the way our physical minds have adapted to life on a planet (as in 'ground -> sky -> space' as opposed to the vertical bands that i had previously which help break the habit of thinking that horizontal bands are 'right', yet don't necessarily put the viewer at ease!).
i will speak to some friends that are graphic designers, yes.. always good for assistance.
the speed of the site is achieved through use of nginx and having used the new-relic service for a week or two (their free period) to locate bottlenecks and fix or remove slow pages/plugins. i also changed the theme to reduce graphics files and use css wherever possible.
when i turn gallicache on the page load often between 0.5 and 2 seconds!
oneward!
Good luck with your site. Below are my experience with the site (only on the looks):
- The registration confirmation email landed in the spam directory of my gmail. Is it your IP address or hosting provider? - I did not have this issue with 2 other elgg sites on gmail.
- I find the theme too dark. Far too dark.
- I feel that explanations (on home page, about, confirmation email etc) are too long, or I get that feeling because of the liberal use of bold, italic etc.
- Is "joyn the community" a play with the word or a spelling mistake? (same in whereever "joyn" is used - in emails etc).
Good luck & Best Regards.
Hi Ura,
Good luck with the site. I did not do any detailed analysis , but the dark theme doesn't feel in line with the purpose of the site. Earth-Heart, I associate that with lots of bright color as the earth and feelings are..
A technical thing. In IE (8,9,10) the logo gets messed up. It is ok in FF, Chrome and Safari.
A tip on the front page. Try to make it immediately clear to visitors what the community is about and why to join. If it was not your site, I would not taken that effort. Most people don't. The attention span on newly visited sites is usually very short or it immediately draws attention to your interest.
@ ura soul , according to İşöğüçı , I also found the theme”too dark. Far too dark" I might be wrong but look around and see how big companies are spending on Theme and color. It is millions of money. Why, if people are not comfortable with the color, it does not matter how much weed or gold is sold on the website. If your site has clashing colors, your users will spend less time on that site and hit close or logout and continue with other interest in their lives. That is why YouTube, FaceBook, new yahoo and oh oh oh Microsft and other small companies have been changing color lately. Otherwise it is a nice project. I am also working on a large or global scale project just like Facebook membership scale and I have to listen to my members. At one point, my site members did not like some colors, the font size and the location of navigation buttons and I had to change it in order to accommodate the majority test. My site is also in beta stage and I am working on few design and optimization then it will go live. Remember, scratch where it hurts most and you will feel some relief and last but not least, if your site members are happy, you might not like what they like but soon you will join them too!
Good luck
thanks all for responding; the stimulation is helpful for sure. the site is a little different to many others in that even though i have put lots of energy into it, it is still only a 'back' project in that it is there to support my other projects which are not public yet. so i am not so focussed on drawing in 'cold' traffic; i think that most will visit due to encountering other media i have shared.
@İşöğüçı: i think the spam mail issue is due to the IP of the host having been blacklisted previously (leaseweb) - i attempted to resolve this and didn't get very far. i'll look into this again soon.
text boxes: i am re-wording the text now, yes.. i continually revise these parts of the site when i have time/space to.. i have been dealing with technical issues for weeks and now will look at resolving the ui/text clarity.
joyn: yes, 'joyn' is a word-hack... haha.. language wil be a particular focus on the site when it is fully loaded with my content. i have a lot to share.
@gerard: thanks for the IE tip.. i'll see if i can find the remnants of microsoft in the recycle bin so i can fix that logo issue. ;)
front-page: i was actually writing the front page box reasons to join when you wrote your message. i have a new version up there now. i will make a video for the homepage at some point soon.
@tom: a key aspect of the energy of the community i am intending is to live from the heart and respect free will.. so i will build the site and theme as i prefer, based on my own knowledge and experience... i am not at all served by following what the 'big money corporations' are doing; i am not really a herds-man ;).
i appreciate that certain design rules are significant and i appreciate that i am breaking some of them when i would be best served by observing them. ;)
i continue to evolve the site design and colours.
i may at some point offer multiple themes or at least a way of altering the brightness/darkness.
i already use the stylish plugin to turn any corporate sites i use into dark versions.. i strongly dislike the standard white youtube now.. dark youtube is so much more pleasant!
@michele: i forgot to mention that the other cause of the speed of my site is the lazy_load images plugin and the lazy_hover plugin.. i found both increased the page load significantly.
thanks again all
after 2 days of tweaking, cleaning, polishing and generally spitting at the screen and buffing source-code i now have updated the site in response to your suggestions here.. the look is much improved as i lightened the background and many page elements and lessened the amount of colours used on main page elements... many colours remain. :)
i still have a few elements to update and finalise.. and some bugs to fix. thanks to all here!
i have now made the following changes:
as always i am open to feedback and anyone's thoughts..