Welcome to Our New Design
If
you are a regular visitor then you’ve probably noticed that we made
some design changes yesterday afternoon. The transition went off
without a hitch thanks to The Open Planning Project’s Anil Makhijani, Andy Cochran and Rob Marianski.
I just wanted to take a moment to walk you through the new design and
provide another opportunity for feedback here in the comments section.
- For Streetsblog, one of the big goals of the redesign was to make our San Francisco, Los Angeles and National Blog Network
web sites more accessible. In the old design, links to these sites were
buried in our sidebar. Now you can find them via the tabs in the
header. - You can still find handy links to the Comments, Calendar and Submit Content
pages up in the Streetsblog header as well. "Submit Content" used to be
called "Contribute" but we thought that it sounded too much like we
were asking for money (which we may be doing soon, but not yet). For
now, we’re just asking you to tag your links, photos and videos so we
can feature them here on Streetsblog. This is actually a really
interesting part of the web site if you haven’t visited it before. - In the thin header at the very top you may notice that the Livable Streets "Groups" site has been renamed "Community."
We felt this better reflected our mission to help Livable Streets
activists connect with each other, share information and resources, and
generally become more aware of themselves as a growing national
movement. We’ve been steadily improving the Community features over the
last few months and really want to ramp that up in the coming months. Have you joined yet? - Streetfilms and Streetswiki
have remained pretty much the same, aside from the new header. I’d be
curious to hear what people think we need to do with Streetswiki to
make it a more useful resource. - You’ll note that we’ve added Livable Streets Education
to the top nav bar as well. Run by Kim Wiley-Schwartz and Rebecca
Jacobs, the Education Project is starting to work in classrooms
throughout New York City to train the next generation of Livable
Streets activists. This is a very cool program and we’ll have a more
detailed post on it tomorrow. - We are hearing
some people say that they miss seeing our logo depicting the
silhouetted street scene. We like it too but felt that it contributed
to the site’s header being a bit too busy and heavy. For
what it’s worth, you can still find the logo on the Livable Streets
Initiative homepage. If there’s enough of a popular outcry, perhaps we
can ask our designer Andy Cochran to figure out a way to bring it back
to the other sites as well. (In addition, the L.A. Streetsblog logo can be found at the Los Angeles Streetsblog page on Facebook.)
That’s
all for now. If you have any feedback on the new design or features
that you’d like to see us improving or developing, please leave a
comment or shoot us an email.