Always start with the content! The website for my meetup group will be pretty simple for now. I’m just jotting down my thoughts here:
Goals for the website:
- Get people excited about the meetup group so they’ll want to join us!
- Help members (or anyone visiting the site) find useful resources for what they want to learn
- Share the cool stuff we’re making
The beginning of a content outline:
- Description or mission statement
- Current meetups/projects
- List of the tutorials/resources that members are using
- Code of conduct
- Links to and info about our communication channels (Twitter, GitHub, Slack)
- Photos?
I almost forgot just how much stuff I need to write before I can make this website! Tomorrow I’ll create a first draft of the home page, which will probably just contain an introduction and some links. I’ll look for some example codes of conduct to start with, too. Now that I think about it, there really isn’t much content to put on this website yet! Figuring out what content we’ll need will be an ongoing project.
I thought I’d create all the content first, then figure out how to organize it on the website (information architecture and whatnot), and then create it. But that could take too long, and there are too many unknowns right now as far as the content is concerned! So, in the spirit of iterative design, maybe I should make my goal a bit smaller: just make the first version of the home page. I’ll draft up some content really quickly (I can improve it later), and then I’ll focus on actually creating the website. Then when it’s done, I can get feedback on it and continue to improve it. Yeah, that’s a better idea. I feel so Scrum-tastic!