Atlanta Outdoor Club

Here's another thing I've been thinking about. When a person first comes to our website, they are presented with bare-bones information on what the difficulty ratings are, a blurb on "My Accounts" and "Event" and a calendar.

It's extremely easy to sign up for stuff. This is good.

Because it's so easy, people can sign up without giving much thought to exactly what kind of club we are, or what the event really entails. This is bad.

Sure, there are links that a person can click that will give them information about the club, and the event write up right there... but most people are lazy. (Sorry, but it's true, haha). We have some links that list Trail/Outdoor Etiquette, but again, a lot of people will be too lazy to read this. As a result, we may end up with people smoking or even drinking on the trail (and in a state park, this is very, very bad.)

I know I may piss some people off here, but I would like to suggest we reconsider the design of our website. The instructional designer in me says people need to understand a bit about the club, difficulty ratings, etiquette, and other things before they even THINK about signing up. One way to do this is to change our home page. We don't want to kill them with information, or put anyone off, but I've noticed that on more and more events we are getting people who are not qualified. What I would like to see is a landing page that says something like "Welcome to the AOC" (or something a lot cooler!). Then, we can have a paragraph or two talking about who we are and what we do. Then a paragraph about how we are committed to the preservation of the great outdoors and we respect that by blah blah blah. Then we mention how we are also committed to safety, and to ensure that, we include a few paragraphs about safety and outdoor etiquette. This is also a good time to mention "responsible drinking" or whatever.

Finally, we have a short paragraph and link that says something like "Think the AOC is for you? Click this link and check out our events calendar. If you see something that you'd like to try, signing up is easy!" (We need to emphasize difficulty ratings in ALL events) And so on...

We also should have a link (like we do now) in the top left to let current members log in to see the calendar any time they want. That way, they wouldn't have to scroll in order to get to the calendar.

This is a fine line--we don't want to scare off anyone who genuinely wants to enjoy the great outdoors, but on the other hand, we don't want to be responsible for any health issues on the trail, nor do we want to ruin a good hike when unqualified people just can't handle it. And we do NOT want to advertise ourselves as a singles club or party club. Ok, sure people meet and we know how to have a good time, but I think we need to be VERY clear about our intent on most of our events. Cabin or overnight canoe fun is one thing but day drinking on a trail is not good.

Ok, I'll shut up now.

If we do go with a slight redesign and the "What it's all about" link, I wanted to add to that. We can add "Not sure which event is best for you? Why not come to our monthly social, held blah blah blah..." This will be another opportunity to mention "responsible" drinking.

Then, at the social, we can each take 30 minutes at the table (in pairs or 3's) and greet new members. That way, everyone will still have time to socialize with old friends yet make new members feel welcome.

Good idea.

As a designer, could you make these changes?

We have a limited budget and based upon where we were six months ago, the new site is a Ferrari compared to a chariot.

Or even in a lovely Word (or something much better) format, I can write it, lay out how I think it should look. As far as code it, don't know how. If someone wants to TEACH me, hot damn! I'll do it!

unfortunately, the website design is kind of stuck right now as we share the basic layout and backend (the "code") with a couple of other clubs.

that said, i'd also like to see some changes, but they wouldn't necessarily be easy to implement because of the way things are set up. we can, however, change any text that we want. so re-writing sections wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.

we do have some coders in the club who could do a(nother) complete redesign, but it would take a while to get up since we'd have to do it in our spare time.

don't stop making suggestions though. anything can happen.

I think just changing the introduction at the top of the page would suffice for now. Perhaps add links in the intro to the relevant information.

Something to remember about the website is that a very similar but much larger club, the Calgary Outdoor Club (COC), has been using and continually improving the code on the website for five years. Last time I checked they had over 800 active members, 100 Event Coordinators, along with large group of officers. I went up there a couple of years ago, attended some of there events and talked to some of their officers and Event Coordinators. Whatever they are doing is working pretty well and they appear to have grown a good bit in the last 18 months since I have been there.

I will also say the AOC has grown a great deal since last May (new club sign ups and active members are way up since then) when we converted the website over. Of course people, including club management, trip leaders and member themselves, are the main reason. But I really don’t think the growth would have been possible with the old website. I know Foz said many times in 2006 and early 2007 the website was the main thing holding AOC back.

Their webmaster, Rhonda Scheurer, has been continuously enhancing the COC since founding the club in 2002. I am not saying everything about the site is perfect, but it is a huge improvement over what we had a year ago. There are something’s we can do a little differently, but we can’t veer too far off from what we have now with some major programming.