Site News

I am trying another layout change based on the feedback from a couple new people to the site/club/area from the last club meeting. They said that it was hard to find out where the club meets or how to contact people. In the past I have gotten some flack over the layout not being as flashy as other club sites (PARC comes to my mind when they say that, and when I ask, that is usually the site they mean. I think there are two kinds of ham web sites. Those with background images, gif animations and blinking text, and those without.) In the past I had attempted to address the "You can't find anything without reading it all." observation by adding bold to key parts. Today I have expanded the main content of the "front page", officers and test session areas so that you do not need to click the "read more" link to see the full article. I have also re-arranged the information and added sub-section "headings" to those key articles and bullet lists of the links after the paragraphs. Hopefully this helps people zero in on what they are looking for when they don't want to read everything. I believe that this change unfortunately makes it so that the new news is pushed further down on each page, so that if you were going to the site to see the latest news, you now have to scroll down further to see it. This shifts the site away from keeping new news article lists front and center (like eHam.net, QRZ.com and ARRL.org do) to keeping the static sticky posts in the lime light. A work-around for this would be to use an RSS reader to track which stories you had read and which are new. If you use FireFox, there are many RSS plug-ins like Sage in addition to the live bookmarks feature.

You can now have an email address with your callsign @ barconline.org!
You can use this as a primary mailbox or have it forwarded to another address.
If you are interested email me at n7uwx@barconline.org and I'll get you signed up.

73's
Tyler N7UWX

After several months of meaning to figure out what code needs to be edited to make all the content float up to the top instead of leaving a big space I have decided to take the easy path.

If I don't have a left menu bar, it all floats to the top.

To facilitate this I have had to re-arrange the order of the right menu bar items. I hope that overall this change makes the site more usable. I know I found it annoying to have to scroll down so far to get to the text box for entering a story or to see the stories in the news aggregator, and now it's all up at the top.

Let me know if this format causes other trouble.

--
Jacob

The site has been modified to allow file uploads from all authenticated users.

Attachments should now be visible even if you are not logged in.