Seeking ideas for lptexas.org

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Jon_Roland's picture

We are looking for suggestions for improvements of our Drupal/CiviCRM site http://lptexas.org . There is money for making it more appealing and useful, so suggestions or perhaps a little volunteer work could lead to contract work. No promises, but perhaps worth your attention. Some of the obvious ones include:

  1. Better online donation form that meets federal and state reporting requirements.
  2. Subsites for every county that can be managed by the county chair or someone local to post things like calendars of events.
  3. Subsites for candidates that they can manage.
  4. Easier access to things like platform and resources.
  5. Localized mailing lists and support for blockwalking and get-out-the-vote efforts.
  6. Localized support for issuing press releases and other announcements.
  7. Localized discussion forums.
  8. Support for local meetings like that provided by meetup.com.
  9. Automatic reminders to candidates for reporting, tailored to each candidate.
  10. Support for state and district events and activities.

I have been away for the group for a while but intend to become more active.

Comments

Comments

Daniel Norton's picture

Generally, it looks clean and the server is responding quickly. (I have experience with an nginx front server if things slow down.) Here are some comments to consider:

  1. Consider simplifying home page and reducing length of the main feed section there. That will help make the first impression clear, concise and immediate. (It might also reduce load time.)
  2. Put social media icons on home page. (e.g.
    Only local images are allowed. Only local images are allowed. Only local images are allowed. Only local images are allowed.
  3. Collapse the navigation menu on sub-pages.
  4. Run a utility to find broken links (there are several).
    (Some expired ConstantContact links don't report 404, so you’ll need to review those manually.)
  5. That huge block at the top of every page interferes with reaching the main content. If it must remain, consider rearranging the underlying HTML to improve SEO.
  6. Allowing anonymous comments will increase activity. You can still moderate them before posting.

The design and the

heydemo's picture

The design and the presentation of content are very bland and clinical. There's nothing here that makes me care about being a libertarian. Compare to Obama's site - http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/newenergysplash/ - which casts itself in a heroic light centering around a direct and emotional call to action.

All of the social media intergration in the world won't make a difference unless you give people something to care about.

What are some other sites using?

Jon_Roland's picture

Obama's site has been mentioned, but he can afford a large team to maintain it. We are looking to CMS as a way to enable ease of maintenance by non-programmers. Can we make Drupal look like that? How? What would be the performance issues? Are we going to need to use tools like Macromedia?

We also want to appeal to Spanish-speaking voters. Is there is way to flip pages between different languages?

Performance may eventually become an issue. I suspect not within the next couple of years, but when do we need to anticipate it may become an issue?