Introduction
Another month, another status report. The goal is to keep both the IACWEB team and the IAC leadership apprised of our progress to date, tasks remaining, and any major open issues.
Please submit any public questions or comments using the comment form below. Please direct anything of a sensitive nature to me via my contact form, or call me at 303-619-4814.
Accomplishments
Look and Feel team (Jim Ward, Laurie Zaleski, Rafa Soldan):
- Solicited comments, both online and via teleconference, on two different sets of screen mockups
- Tweaked the mockups in response to comments received -- final version expected soon
- Published a strong, usable draft of the Web Style Guide ("version 0.5")
Editing Team (Lorrie Penner, Trisha Roberts, Lynn Bowes, Trish Deimer-Steineke)
- Reworking page content:
- 95 completed, awaiting review
- 10 in progress
- 7 reviewed and approved
- 36 not yet started (mostly descriptions of awards and patches)
- Commissioned several new articles:
- "Getting Started" - Mike Heuer
- Joy of Aerobatics - Greg Koontz
- Intro to Aresti - Brian Howard
- "Recreational Aerobatics" - Gordon Penner
- "Government Representation" - Darren Pleasance
Webmaster (DJ):
- Increased memory capacity to address significant performance problems. Although this doubled our monthly hosting cost from $11 to $22, the new configuration should suffice for our initial traffic load. (Meaning that if we succeed in attracting lots more site traffic, we may need to further increase capacity -- but that's a "high grade" problem!)
- Wrote software to automatically download the latest membership list from EAA's server (thanks to Doug Lovell for arranging the data feed with EAA IT!)
- Fixed image URLs
- Updated the legal notices and P&P Manual; submitted to IAC Board for review
- Created a Twitter feed for later use
- Created a Google Account for later use (including YouTube and Google+)
- Provided project status and financial info for IAC Board meeting
Next Steps
Significant tasks remaining:
- Write software to automatically update our site's member records based on the latest EAA membership list. Target date: 4/21.
- Finish content edits. Target date: 4/30.
- Implement the new look & feel. Target date: 5/15.
- Define the new menu hierarchy, and categorize each content page accordingly. Target date: 5/15.
- Fix broken links. Target date: 5/15.
Once these tasks are complete, I think we should ask a select group of beta testers to review and play with the site for a month or so. In parallel, I'll be finishing up some behind-the-scenes tasks on the server.
Target launch date for the parity release: 7/1/2012.
