www.lakeholidaynews.com

  • If anyone has any comments or criticisms on our new blog, we’d love to hear them.

    lakeholidaynews.com

    The site is focused on legal and development issues at a homeowner’s association at Lake Holiday in Cross Junction, VA, a small town in northwestern VA. There’s a lot of text, and since there’s a lawsuit and state regulators involved, a lot of it has a dry, legal sound to it.

    The goal of the site is to provide information to HOA members in a factual but still interesting and readable format. We want to be forward leaning a bit, but not bleeding edge.

    The site is a rework of Kaushal Sheth’s In Business theme. There are a few issues we know about. The site makes use of javascript and ajax-related plugins, one of which (livecalendar) sometimes causes a perpetually spinning gif. The markup validates except for a plugin that we use to rate posts, which we’ll fix when the plug-in gets updated. Some of the colors/fonts from plugin CSS files need to be standardized.

    We’re of the mind that all criticism helps us make the site better, so we appreciate all comments, however critical. If you have any browser-specific comments, please let us know your browser. Thanks in advance.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • too wide. I have horizontal scroll bars in ff at 1024×768 resolution.

    Thread Starter frisco

    (@frisco)

    Thanks for the quick comment. Made some quick changes which I’ll have to adjust further, but the horizontal scroll bar in Firefox is gone at 1024×768. In IE7B2 I still see one at that resolution, but all of the content of the site is now in the window.

    Looks pretty good for what you’re doing, sharing info. I would think this design might work with the main column as a fluid width that fills the screen whatever the resolution. Right now I think it is fixed width and flushed to the left side of the screen, which could still be weird on either small 800x or wide 1280x resolutions.

    This might be from the theme you chose, but I like the blockquote quote marks. The printer-friendly pages are nice b/c Gamerz wp-print plugin is wonderful, with those nice footnoted URL’s, a useful feature. Also, your images open the larger-version nicely.

    I don’t understand the point of the post-ratings plugin. How does it benefit your site’s purposes to let readers say it’s a 1-star post or an 8-star post? Seems like a gizmo, to me, mildly distracting. I would use a post-ratings plugin for something like, perhaps a cookbook blog — rate your favorite recipes.

    Good luck with your site.

    Thread Starter frisco

    (@frisco)

    Thanks for the observation on the fixed width. That is a carry-over from the original theme that we haven’t changed yet, but it’s getting to be time for it to go.

    On the post-ratings plug-in: there are 2 benefits, if it gets used in a meaningful way. First, it helps us to identify what issues the HOA membership finds important, ie, which posts strike close to home. Second, once there is a body of ratings, we can draw attention to highly rated posts on the sidebar. We anticipate that there will be 1-2 posts a week, so we want a mechanism other than archive-type stuff to have people find important posts. I think your comment draws attention to a good point, though. We probably ought to change the prompt from ‘Rate this post’ to something more like ‘Was this post informative?’ The prompt as it is doesn’t make clear the purpose of the rating system. Of course, the big downside to any rating system is that it depends on getting enough data, otherwise the results look silly and irrelevant. Since our site is 1 day old, the jury is still out on that issue.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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