So What’s in a Website?
Yeah, that’s the question that constantly is in my mind when I’m not writing music or gaming. About two years ago now, I rebuilt Tastyfresh.com into its fourth, fifth or sixth iteration depending on how you look at it. The focus of the site though was not on adding new features, ultra-cool design, or even increased usability for the site. All of these probably should have been considered though. The focus of the redesign though was actually just moving all content that wasn’t a part of the forum from static web pages to a dynamic content management system.

What’s so Significant About Managing Content?
Content management has become extremely important in the business world today. The reason is simple. As time goes by, your company will need to add more and more pages to their websites. At the same time, older pages will still need to be maintained. Eventually you reach a point where the amount of content exceeds what you or your small internal team of web developers can maintain effectively. This means that you will need to redistribute the ownership of this content to others within your business so that not only are you freed up to maintain the structure of the site but so that the people who best know what the content should be are also the ones creating it. When you hit this point, you either do the redistribution or the site begins to suffer and is eventually crippled.

In Tastyfresh.com’s case, one person has always been responsible for every bit of content on the site. Currently, we have almost 200 articles, 150 reviews and maybe 20-30 other pages. Each one had to be entered (with some exceptions) by myself. I have been the gatekeeper on all of this, until recently. And this has significantly held up our ability to provide you the reader with more content. This was the driving force behind the last redesign and now, thanks to the Joomla CMS, I have been able to start assigning the content editing duties to other people within the site. For example, John Baker has entered all of the reviews for the past year or so and starting now Alex Wilson will be entering the articles. I hope to slowly bring in other people as well depending on how the site continues to grow. In effect, this move also takes Tastyfresh.com out of the hands of ultimately one person and distributes it across the community. And it’s this distribution of content that is partially driving this redesign as well.

Distributed Content?
It isn’t enough for me to just say I want more people to help post content to the site. That isn’t really what I need. What I need, what the community needs, is more leaders, more doers, more ideas and so on. We need to grow and evolve into whatever the next stage for Tastyfresh.com is.

Before Jamey turned the site over to me in 2002, he was already working on the revival of articles on the site. He had launched the site originally in 1996 and over the next year or so added a few articles from time to time. The bulk of the site however was a CD database that he had created which allowed people to post reviews. Around 1999 or 2000, he took all of the content down and posted boards. The boards are what truly forged this community together. Since he had removed the articles though, there wasn’t any permanent meat to the site. And in part, this was one reason why he wanted to bring them back.

When he turned the site over to me, we had already had many discussions about this idea; from there the magazine was formed. Our original editor was Doug Theodore and our reviewer was Bill Sikes. They lasted for about two issues and then departed for various and valid reasons. It was then that I knew that if I was going to make this thing work, I had to not only take it slow, but I had to lay down the foundation first. This is what I have spent my time doing on this site until now.

Last year the reviews were to the point that I could turn them over to someone else without fear of a loss of quality. In fact, John Baker, our review editor, has managed to build up a good group of reviewers, keep them fairly organized and increased the frequency of reviews from every two months to every week. He has also put together some rough review guidelines that I should have created initially too. And… shortly after this article goes live, Doug Theodore will be returning as the Assistant Review Editor and with that he is bringing even more ideas to the table on how reviews will be done.

Alex Wilson, the new magazine editor, has had roughly two months to figure the reigns of the magazine. He could have kept things exactly as they were while I was doing it, but he’s not. He’s bringing back some things like “The Drop” and considering the introduction of several new columns. He also wants to bring more of a spiritual aspect to it as well. Over all, he’s taking the magazine and going to places I simply cannot do with all of my other commitments.

I am saying all of this to make the point that this community, when it works together, is better at creating the direction of this site than just me alone. The site has reached a point where many of us have an understanding on various levels of what needs to be done to take this community to the next level. As people demonstrate not only a commitment to this community, but as someone who sees an opportunity to improve it and a willingness to put their ideas in action, I want to empower them to do so. The community, not just one person should be providing the direction. This is why it is important to be able to distribute the site’s content out to more people.

All of this would not be possible had I not done the last redesign in the manner I did it.

But Wait… There’s More
One of the things that I was not truly happy about with the last redesign was the site’s navigation. In order to get things into the new system with my knowledge at the time, I made a compromise that hurt the site. One of the nice things about the Tastyfresh Magazine was the presentation of it as a complete “issue” like a real printed magazine. Sure we never had copious amounts of images and overblown graphics, but articles were arranged into issues and you could read it as a coherent, complied publication. The current site does not allow for this type of formatting. I plan to change that.

Another problematic area is that of the Groove Fellowship initiative. For those of you new to the site, the idea here is to grow local house parties of sort where Christian DJs, producers and club goers can regularly meet and socialize. These can be geared around just having fun or develop more into a community service or Bible study group. Tastyfresh.com would simply act as the uniting force for these groups and organizational headquarters.

As just about everyone who has attended Cornerstone will tell you, there’s something truly awesome about meeting people from the site. All the tension melts away. You find out that people like… well… me aren’t the jerks you thought they were and the community, the friendships, and the same caring spirit you see in the message boards only becomes magnified once you meet each other in real life.

The plan here is to start building out a section on the site dedicated to these communities. I’m not exactly sure what form this will take as of yet, but I do envision each fellowship having it’s own page here listing their events, the leaders and members, contact information and so on. There may be room for more, but who knows. It’s all in development right now.

Those are just two of the areas that need attention. Even when I finish this new redesign, that doesn’t mean I will have found the best solution. Right now, I’m simply looking for a better one that will get us to the next level. This isn’t a race. It’s more like playing a fine-tuned instrument. You have to know it well enough to know when it needs a bit of work and then the dedication to adjust it as you go.

It’s All About the Look?
Well, to some extent it is. My latest pet peeve regarding sites is that they have all started to look like blogs. Nothing is wrong with a blog, but you look at a site and you can just tell. Something just screams “I wrote this in about 5 minutes and 10 minutes before that, I wrote something else!” It’s one article stacked on top of another, stacked on another. The desire to shove as much content out to people as quickly as possible has truly killed painstakingly crafted design. I want to bring that back to Tastyfresh.com.

Bringing it back to the site is a bit funny to say if you have been around for more than 8 years though. The site has never been the crowned achievement of design. Jamey Wright when he created the site was a minimalist. When I took over, I wanted to respect that for a while. Through the years, I’ve made some gradual changes to the site over the course of many revisions. And then came the most recent design. I took a risk and threw out the traditional blue and introduced green as the main color. I’m not even sure now why I picked green, but it was new and “fresh” for the site back then. Today, I want the blue to make a comeback. Green is still a part of the new “color language” of the site and will remain that way. I just won’t use it as much.

Imagery is seriously lacking today. If you look at the site’s homepage today, it’s nothing more than text blocks and if you’re lucky, a small image. I want to see some dynamic, changing imagery used on the site, maybe not on every article, but definitely on every major section. This is a site about an energetic, vibrant culture and the imagery should reflect that. Where is the slick magazine feel that should be here?

As a graphic designer, in many ways I failed in this part of the last redesign. There was a catch though. First, I was new to the Joomla CMS. I didn’t know how to accomplish a lot of what should have been done with just the templates. Second and most importantly, I did not want to do anything that would reduce a content provider’s ability to edit the site with ease. This more than anything was the rationale to the weak design. I wanted to make sure I could edit and post an issue of the magazine within one or two evenings after work. This, I did accomplish. I don’t want to sacrifice that in the new design, but I’m not going to compromise the needs of a content provider either.

If successful, this redesign will have the site looking like a professional magazine and community. The blog feel will be gone. What I want is something similar to online fashion magazine sites. Why not other EDM sites? It’s mostly because they simply don’t set a good standard. They just don’t. They are stuck in the blog stage of design. The two best sites I have recently have been BPM and Resident Advisor. BPM is almost a pure blog design while RA’s recent design has managed to suck content in from anywhere and everywhere and found a way to present it all as just as important as everything else. Sure, it looks like a great club flyer, but it’s little more than that.

Where Are We Now?
We’re still months away from seeing any of these changes yet, but they are coming and I promise that it will be worth the wait. Right now, I’m the research stage. I am looking to see exactly what is out there and I am taking some pretty serious notes. I am posting questions on the message boards about it as well. If you see one, please respond. I am also talking things over privately with the TF staff as well. Hopefully, I can pull this off. The standard I’m setting is high, but it’s time there was a good standard for design of EDM sites.