Redesign for CocoaHeads Silicon Valley
I put together a fairly simple site design for CocoaHeads Silicon Valley. There's shades of Cocoa Blogs here, but it's more stripped down and focused. Stephen just put it live.
One of the main things I wanted to address in the text was the fact that you do not need to sign up or have a degree in computer science to attend a meeting (that's so I can get in). I guess we didn't make this clear enough in the past, so now it's it's in 18px Helvetica Neue.
The other important message to get across is that you shouldn't worry about feeling out of place. The group is very welcoming to new faces and it's a great way to find your rhythm for Cocoa development. I think most people leave there a bit more energized to go back and write some code.
Maybe the most important thing we do at these meetings, though, is tackle code problems that are difficult to describe over email. I know from the personal mentoring sessions that it's much easier to get the lightbulb to go on in person.
There's an RSS feed now, too.
Redesign for CocoaHeads Silicon Valley
Posted Dec 28, 2006 — 6 comments below
Posted Dec 28, 2006 — 6 comments below
Ian — Dec 28, 06 2941
Nice design, too.
Scott Stevenson — Dec 28, 06 2942
Maybe you should start a chapter there. I'm impressed that there's one in Kuala Lumpur.
Bret — Dec 28, 06 2943
But - how about a comments section or forum of sorts for Q & A about the meetings? Also, moving forwards, a well-defined place on there for posting transcripts, code, links, notes, videos/MP3s, etc would probably be a good idea...
Scott Stevenson — Dec 29, 06 2945
I think the mailing list does that at the moment. If you think there's a good reason to have something that's web-based, I'm sure we could make it happen.
place on there for posting transcripts, code, links, notes, videos/MP3s, etc would probably be a good idea...
Makes sense to me.
Bret — Dec 29, 06 2947
I find web-based systems often have greater community participation, with lower barrier-to-entry for folks (pass the captcha and just post; instead of signing up to a list, setting your options, possibly waiting to get approved by the moderators, setting up another sorting rule, downloading the mail archives, etc). Also, I find that I can get web access almost everywhere, but sometimes the mail ports are firewalled; which leaves me wading thru a webmail client (which lacks good spam filtering... ugghh!) to find the mails from the list. The less fiddley something is, the more likely it is to get used.
Um... what's the cocoaheads.org site running on?
Scott Stevenson — Dec 29, 06 2950
Good points.
Um... what's the cocoaheads.org site running on?
I don't know anything about the server environment.