Helping new users

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. IE7 has an RSS button as well, and if you're running Vista you can add the IE subscribed RSS feed to your sidebar. Let me know how this works out by submitting comments, questions or concerns to webmaster at barconline.org.