As the editor of the recently launched GlenEllynLife.com, my intention with GEL is pretty straight-forward; to present the latest news and accurate information about Glen Ellyn happenings.

Since the "soft" launch of GlenEllynLife.com on Dec 10, 2008, 2 other Glen Ellyn sites have surfaced and 1 evolved:

GlenEllynite.com

WelcomeToGlenEllyn.com (launched yesterday)

GlenEllyn.org (redesign released today)

I'm curious what members of the GEBB community think about these sites (along with GlenEllynLife.com) and what needs they fulfill for you? What do you like about these sites? What do you dislike about these sites? What type of information do you want to see? As readers/members of the GEBB please feel free to compare/contrast this site as well.

That new one doesn't do much for me. Mainly because it is visually unappealing and none of the pictures or stories appear to work. Then there is the one with the crappy videos...not a fan. The village obviously needs a site....and yours is good and full of info...but WTF is the attraction to GE all of a sudden? No way anyone is making a dime off of these things. With what Ted pays me as a paid participant, I am fairly certain that he is in the hole.

And you neglected to mention www.downtownglenellyn.com

Clamato,

Thanks for your perspective.

The Go Downtown website has been up for close to 2 years. Diane McGinley and her Go Downtown team have provided much needed information about news the Glen Ellyn downtown.

I raised the topic to encourage dialogue about the more recent websites that have emerged in the past 2 months.

The Welcome To and GlenEllynite sites seem like an extension of the Chamber of Commerce - essentially plugging downtown businesses. Nothing wrong with that but I'm not sure it's going to attract huge repeat viewership. I know the latest trend is for businesses to try and establish a social network of sorts around their product line up. I'm not sure there is enough of a critical mass of people who care enough to socialize around the CBD offerings.

Your site appears to me to be a cross between a blog and a GE news aggregater.

The village website is prettier than the old one. Seems to do its job - which is to act as a portal to community info (zoning laws, directories, etc.)

I just wonder if any of these other efforts are going to survive. The GEBB has built its critical mass over several years. It's pretty bare bones visually. But when the main point is a bulletin board conversation, you don't need a lot of the bells and whistles that the other sites, yours included, have.

Ted is a pretty hands-off moderator, and he is using off-the-shelf forum software, but I'm sure he still has to put in a lot of hours just to keep this thing up and running. If I try and imagine doing all that AND having to take the time to find/create/encode sexy website content and graphical design, I'd have to ask myself is it really worth it? Maybe its a labor of love for the other websites. But I doubt it. There's probably a an end game, and if hoped-for progress isn't made, I suspect they won't stick around.

Presumably I’m allowed to chip in my two cents...

I won’t comment on content — each has its own target audience, objectives, budget, goals, business plan to get there, etc.

But they all have one thing in common: all are designed by graphic artists who obviously have large, wide-screen, high-resolution monitors and who assume everyone has the same high-end hardware configuration.

The beauty of HTML (the programming code used to build web pages) is that it can be used to create pages that automagically adjust to fit almost any screen size. If used properly, on a large, high-res screen a page will appear wide but short; on a small, low-res screen the same page will appear narrow but tall. It will word-wrap...

Like this on a large screen...

and like
this on
a small
screen.

This is desireable because surfers don’t mind scrolling down to see more content, but they hate having to scroll left-and-right in order to finish reading a sentence or to see the other half of an image.

Yes, even people in Glen Ellyn still have small screens. Grandparents and kids with hand-me-done computers. Schools and libraries that are often a few years behind the curve.

Equally important, there are users who suffer from low vision or who have small-screen laptops who need to set the resolution to a lower resolution / larger view in order to see and read the words.

It doesn’t matter with intranets, where the IT department sees to it that everybody has the same hardware and software. And it doesn’t matter if your target audience is, say, ad agencies where you can be sure that your prospects all have the latest-and-greatest.

But for a general, consumer-oriented “everyman” site? Design it to work for all users and all screen sizes.

It takes more knowledge and skill to design banners, multiple images and other page elements that word-wrap, but it can be — and should be — done. Especially for sites that hope for return traffic.

But, sadly, such design seems to be a lost art. Probably won’t matter any more when everyone has 24" monitors running at 1680 x 1050 pixels and 20-20 vision. But in the meantime, there’s little benefit to pissing off a large percentage of your prospects.

</rant> —Ted E.

Great points, Ted. We have an accounting/payroll/timesheet program at work (that cost a ridiculous amount) and it will not work properly with certain configurations of monitor appearance (extra large DPI settings, etc.). AND it has a lot of "locked" window sizes, which means that if you don't have all your settings right, you can't actually see some of the options and "buttons", let alone scroll right/left to see them. Talk about pissing off your clients!

I note that scaling up in Firefox (Ctrl +) on the GEBB produces all word wrapping (except for the Google ads at the top). That's nice.

And, for the record, I'm thirtysomething with 20/20 vision and I can't stand having small type on my 21" monitor. People routinely make fun out of me for having such large fonts on my monitor. But it really cuts down on the eye strain.

quote:

...word wrapping (except for the Google ads at the top)...

Yeah, I never did figure out a workaround for that. Google sets the size, using 780 pixels (bad) instead of, say, 90% width (good).

The poor layouts of software such as the example you described seem to come from designers who have a print background and never went on to learn the incredible cleverness of the flexible web. In print, 8-1/2 x 11 is always 8-1/2 x 11. The fact that computer users can change a designer's fonts, sizes, layouts etc. makes them crazy.

Although for the web I blame Microsoft. They never did quite understand the internet, and set their web design tool FrontPage to default to pixel-driven widths (bad) instead of percentage-driven widths (good). Made naive print designers happy, but ignored industry standards and good practices in the process. —Ted E.

Wow.

I just gathered together all of the sites that offer general news, information and stories about Glen Ellyn.

It's now the ”What's New“ section of the G-E.com home page. What a list!

Hope it's a hobby for most of 'em. Did I miss any? —Ted E.

Glen Ellyn just surpassed Chicago in number of city-specific websites.

Glen Ellyn..."The Website Village"

At least Durand won't sue us if we have a kick-@ss slogan like that.

Ted, I think all these folks saw you living the high life, raking in obscene Google Ad revenue, being lauded in print media everywhere as a titan of the bulletin board industrial complex, etc. and now they want their piece too. Can't blame them, I suppose.

Okay- so you guys really sound like a group of old cranky men. Why all of the concern over how many Glen Ellyn websites exist? I say bring em' on. I am responsible for www.GlenEllynite.com and proud of it- even if you can't see my fancy graphics or crappy videos on your tiny monitors. With all due respect to my elders... html based sites with no graphics, video, etc. are like black and white television sets- irrelevant. Bye for now- I have jump on Twitter.com and send a tweet out before I check my Facebook for new friends. It's a brave new world gentlemen, don't be so grumpy!

Please don't awaken Swampdog and PM of Tysonia. They're napping.

Look, it's no concern. Erelumpin asked for opinion and I gave it. I didn't say the sites should stop doing what they're doing. It's just unlikely that this grumpy old(?) man will be a regular visitor.

Welcome Rachie! I hope you know what you are in for when you throw down a rant like that here.

I have a 21" monitor here at work so I can view your website without scrolling around. However, my company blocks video and embedded video, so I am not able to view your 'crappy videos'. Maybe that is for the better. As a result, your website looks like the following photo on my computer.

Didn't one of these sites try to get the village to kick in some big dough to keep it going?

And stop being so mean to us, Rachie. We are old, we are crotchety, we can be rude and turn on someone like a school of piranha.

Hey Rachie: Bring a production assistant with you next time. Then, you won't take video of 4 cars on in front of a strip mall.

And dump the black screen with 14 seconds of EDC address and phone number which ends with a 2 second shot of Crescent to wrap up your video.

Has anyone heard of SEO? It's a new fangled thing that all of the kiddies really dig. Thanks for the production advice. I'm a one woman production machine and I know that some of the video could look better than it does. I worked in broadcast production at Leo Burnett for years before giving it all up to stay home with my daughter. I've lived in GE my whole life and came up with www.GlenEllynite.com to promote the dying downtown. In addition, I build social media sites for business. SEO is my main goal and that's where the videos come in but I don't want to give away all of my secrets...I hardly know you.

Twitter? Facebook? Sorry, I'm too busy checking out The Well, Prodigy and Compuserve with my Commodore 64 while listening to 8-track tapes to waste time with that stuff.

These are much better than piranha!

quote:

Originally posted by DTM:


I have a 21" monitor here at work

Seriously, !!! They make monitors that big?!!!

Rachael (Rachie) - you sound somewhat unstable; SEO has absolutely nothing to with Kiddies or social media platforms like Twitter or facebook. Unless of course your business model is based on affiliate advertising revenue for sites you control vs. providing a useful service to the citizens of GE?

Regardless, you came up with the site; the site is registered to Katz Recruiters and Katz Recruiters bills it's Organic Rankings systems as being able to: "... provides personalized internet marketing strategy and execution resulting in increased visibility and higher search rankings."

If you are affiliated with this site and/or katz recruiters, why would you want to take such an adversarial position on this board...a board which obviously represents a fairly broad cross section of the GE public and which could serve as a nice referall base for your SEO scheme