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. Forwhat it's worth, you can still find the logo on the Livable StreetsInitiative homepage. If there's enough of a popular outcry, perhaps wecan ask our designer Andy Cochran to figure out a way to bring it backto the other sites as well.
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.
