WordPress is a very powerful Website tool, however out of the box it only exports a single RSS feed. This is useful for most websites, however for our F.A.Q. site it might be useful for schools to subscribe to a single section of the site rather than receiving a feed containing everything.

The Category Specific plugin extends the default WordPress RSS generator and allows custom RSS feeds based upon the category that the post/article has been posted in.

Is this something that we should add to the F.A.Q. website?

APPROVED
Some times the F.A.Q. entries can be quite long winded and contain several different methods to resolve a problem.  This can make the F.A.Q. difficult to and overwhelming to read.

To address this issue, we can introduce expanding text, where a small headline would be displayed that can be clicked.  Once clicked, text behind the headline will be revealed.

Example

Do you think this sort of thing would be useful? Your comments please.

Further to the previous post relating to the home page banner (http://www.scomis.org/webdev/?p=64), we have managed to refine the ideas and come up with a couple of new options.  We have also slightly altered the text that will appear – we felt that the focus for what ScoMIS does should be clear.  Please add your comments below as to which variation of the way the text is displayed you prefer.  Alternatively, if you have any other recommendations, let us know! 

Mockup v10: 

Mockup v10 - based on v7, but new text

 Mockup v10 (picture 2): 

Mockup v10 - based on v7, but new text, on different ScoMIS home page picture

Mockup v8: 

Mockup v8 - Based on v3 but new text

Mockup v9: 

Mockup v9 - Based on v7 with no blending, and new text

During our use of our portal sites we have discovered that printing useful things out, like the information contained in the F.A.Q. portal doesn’t print on the page correctly.

The result is that the menu that is usually displayed on the page is also printed.  Taking up space on the printed page and condensing the content.

A Print Preview showing what the page looks like with the menu showing.

We have discovered that other websites sites have the ability to hide menus and navigation when printing.  We have now modified the F.A.Q. site so that menus are now hidden.  This is will be a temporary fix whilst we work on revised templates for our portal sites.

Print Preview sample with no navigation menu.

It has been pointed out that when people visit the new scomis homepage (www.devon.gov.uk/scomis), it is not obvious what we do.  We decided this could be resolved by amending the banner across the top of the homepage to include a brief description of the service we provide.  Please indicate which proposed banner style you prefer:

Mockup v1:

Mockup V1

Mockup v3:

Mockup V3

Mockup v4:

Mockup V4

Mockup v7:

Mockup V7

Please also comment if you have any other suggestions/combinations that could be tried.

We look forward to hearing your comments….

Updated:  We have discovered a plugin for our F.A.Q. site that generates a Tag Cloud.  We are going to experiment with a banner version for the ScoMIS home page.

Here is an example of an interactive  Tag Cloud

Tag Cloud Example Image

Following some Feedback we received last Friday (23rd) it has been reported that the Training Directory is hard to find.

A lot of text when schools log onto training and then they have to scroll down to open ‘training portal website’ not very user friendly.  Also when opening that page there is another lot of text.  I think it needs streamlining.

Currently the Training Directory can be accessed in 1 of 4 ways. Searching Google for “ScoMIS Training” will also display our training portal within the top 5.

1. Directly – http://training.scomis.org/
2. Clicking the ‘Training Directory’ link in the Key Services area just underneath the banner image on the home page.
3. Clicking the title or any of the training entries that appear in the current courses box, also on the home page.
4. Clicking through to Services > Training, then scrolling to the ‘Training Portal Site’  link at the bottom of the page.

Is there any way that we change this to make the route to the Training Directory more obvious?

When the F.A.Q. site was being developed we wanted to show users which posts were the most popular, the thought behind this was that people would get to most used content quicker by seeing the content that was being viewed.

Is this feature useful? Can it be improved?

Daily Popular List from the ScoMIS F.A.Q.

The original template design for the Portal sites was based upon the main DCC website.  But we found it to be a fairly complicated task to copy the template exactly, so we improved upon it in some areas, but other areas were just done for speed.

One of the areas that I would like comments on, is the side bar navigation, particularly in the F.A.Q. and Training Directory portal sites.  I think that the multi-level nagivation takes up quite a bit of the page and would like to try and reduce it’s foot print.

Default Full Navigation on the F.A.Q. Site

Expandable Menu on the F.A.Q. Site

What do you think?

The Count down has now officially started on the ScoMIS Website Launch.  The ScoMIS website can now be accessed on http://www.devon.gov.uk/scomis.

The old ScoMIS website will continue to exist and will display a message on the home page from Monday 19th April telling users that the site has moved.  The site will display a static news message rather than the dynamic news that users would normally see.

Eventually the old ScoMIS website will be phased out, and parts of the site will be re-directed until the server is fully de-commissioned by County Hall later in 2010.  Until then, the old website will no longer be updated.

ScoMIS are committed to improving and continually developing services and content on our new site.

Thanks to everyone (so far) who has commented on the ScoMIS Website Developments.  Please note that when you comment, it won’t be displayed until it has been through a short approval process.  Any new comments that you post will automatically be approved. 

We are using this measure to prevent “spam” messages from being displayed on the site.