Posts FromApril, 2007

23
Apr 07

New Outside.in Site Design!

Posted by john in General / News — View Comments

This morning we launched a brand-new site design for outside.in, and everyone is abuzz about it here at the offices.

We didn’t intend to do a site redesign. It kind of snuck up on us. The original design by our friends at Hyperakt was great – it looked smart and had a very distinctive look and feel. It could have served us well for a long time to come.

It all started when we brought the fabulous UI designer Doria Fan onto the team, and decided that one of her first tasks should be to design a welcome page for first-time visitors. We saw the design and immediately thought “uh-oh – we’re going to need a total redesign now.” We realized that outside.in had grown so much and so quickly in terms of what you can do, what kinds of information you can access or add, that the initial design was bursting at the seams. So we threw down everything we were doing, called all hands on deck, and proceeded to work like mad to redesign the entire site, front and back, in two weeks.

The original page that Doria was assigned to create was not included in this release, ironically. But the results of the thought process for that page can be seen here today with the new site, and we feel that they are very exciting. You will see, among other things:

• The pages feel roomier, with a 1000-pixel width as opposed to an 800-pixel width.

• The information is better organized, with people-related information always appearing on the left and place-related information always appearing on the right.

• Particular subjects are easier to find, with the new tag clouds at the top-right of pages.

• Images are creeping their way onto the site (finally!)

• Navigation, including language and link colors are clearer, hopefully meaning less confusion for you.

• Forms are better organized and clearer, for easier input from everyone.

Our major aim here was to clear the runway in order to build out the Neighbor and Place aspects of the site, as we are planning on doing in the near future. This means outside.in will be focused not just on the blog stories about your neighborhood, but will be more and more about YOU, and about the people and places around you that make your city and neighborhood what it is.

So now that we’ve cleared the design hurdle, let’s get on with the show… stay tuned – more to come soon.

17
Apr 07

So you signed up for outside.in – now what?

Posted by chrysanthe in General / Tips & Tricks — View Comments

We’re not ones to brag, but new Neighbor sign-up numbers have gone up these past few weeks, so we’re welcoming lots of new users into our fold. I want to highlight just some of what you can do as a registered Neighbor on outside.in for all you newbies (and as a refresher for the old-timers).

Let’s start with submitting stories. When you’re reading your local paper online, or if you see a review of a local restaurant on a message board, you can submit these neighborhood-specific links to outside.in with this tool. As a registered user, you can keep track of any stories you’ve submitted to outside.in on your Neighbor page, which brings me to the next feature…

…your Neighbor page. This is your personality on the site. Upload a photo, write a brief bio, enter your website’s URL and tag yourself with keywords of your interests. Once you’ve created a Place page (with this tool), it will show up here on your Neighbor page with any comments you’ve written. Any stories you submit to the site will also show up with the comments in the center column on your Neighbor page.

You can also tag any story on the site, using the simple categories of “what,” “where,” and “when.” If you read a post that’s about, say, the Red Sox season home opener, you could tag the story with “what” tags sports, Red Sox, baseball, Fenway Park, and spring. For the “where” tag, you’d put the address or zip code the post refers to (in this case, that would be 4 Yawkey Way, Boston, MA). You can also add a “when” tag in the instance of an event, which would be the date and time of the home game.

And for those of you who don’t remember to visit outside.in every day, try out your neighborhood’s RSS feed. If you’re already familiar with and use a feed reader, try adding the feed for your favorite outside.in URL. My feed reader grabs outside.in/11211 (where I live) and outside.in/11217 (where I work) so I can keep up to date with goings-on in the neighborhoods I frequent. Click here if you’re not quite sure what I’m talking about, or e-mail me with questions. You can also subscribe to feeds for specific tags in a given neighborhood, so if you want to be alerted to any crime news in your neighborhood, you can subscribe to the RSS feed at outside.in/11211/tags/crime.

And lastly, you can add local blogs. If you know of a blog that is hyperlocal (meaning that its content pertains to an address, zip code or city) but not yet in our system, submit it here. We know you have lots of great personal and subject-based blogs you’d like to submit, but unless they are about local issues, we can’t include them in outside.in at this time.

So, welcome, new Neighbors. See what’s around you and learn from the old Neighbors at outside.in. If you have questions or comments about what you’re discovering on our site, contact me via e-mail or IM: Chrysanthe@outside.in.

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