Well-designed websites
Oct 22 2008
I thought I would start this thread for people to post up links to websites they like the design of. All ones which they like particular features of.
This is because we are in the process of upgrading libcom, and we are looking for ideas.
These don't have to be lefty websites, they can be any kind.
Many thanks in advance for any tips!
Oct 23 2008
#2
wallpaper is nice, its pretty similar to the guardian's website.
Nov 27 2008
#3
wsws.org have redesigned their website to look similar to that.
Would it be feasible to have a section on the site containing videos and sound files for talks, speeches etc? Sort of like what the Commune do on their site but with the same principles for inclusion as the current library.
Nov 27 2008
#4
the library can currently host embedded videos from other sites (e.g. youtube etc). the new library should have tabs for different ways to browse content (authors, tags, regions etc), so maybe we could have a specific tab for content tagged with video/audio.
depends if we'd have enough video/audio content to justify a dedicated portal - we had some of some japanese riots that was removed from youtube. is there a lot of stuff out there you have in mind? if you post them to library with an intro, tag with video/audio (+ whatever else relevant) and post the embed HTML to the body of the article, then an admin can enable full HTML when approving it from the mod queue and the embedded video/mp3 will appear in the body.
this could be quite a good idea if there's a fair amount of decent embedable content out there. hosting it ourselves would probably be another matter due to the massive bandwidth requirements of streaming video (probably audio too), and the associated hosting costs.
Nov 27 2008
#5
Well it wouldn't work if we had to rely on youtube to keep things up. There wasn't much I had in mind specifically other than a recent Loren Goldner talk, but I think it would be a really good resource to have on the site thanks to its accessibility. I'm sure theres plenty of mp3s and videos of talks by radical thinkers floating around, but like you say hosting it would come at a real cost that could be prohibative.
Nov 27 2008
#6
Quote:
Well it wouldn't work if we had to rely on youtube to keep things up.
Why not, out of interest? I mean as long as its backed up so if someone does decide to crack down it isn't lost, I don't see anything particularly wrong with using one of the free hosting services...
Nov 27 2008
#7
relying on third-party hosts really depends on the copyrighted nature of the content, cos if the third party keeps taking things down our library would be full of dead embeded objects. stuff like lectures by loren goldner, david harvey, chomsky maybe would probably be ok on that front. other stuff might not be. there may well also be better sites than youtube, like those japanese ones you can stream whole films on and stuff. i think it's certainly worth looking into.
however as i say, the library does currently support embedding media content with HTML (only admin-enabled at the moment because all sorts of viruses/booby traps could potentially be embedded by malicious users). if we can track down a load of decent content and add it to the library - and anyone can do this by pasting the embed code from youtube or wherever - then it would make sense to talk about adding specific portals for audio and visual content to the new site (which would be relatively easy to add at a later date given the way we've redesigned it to make navigating content easier).
Nov 27 2008
#8
Steven. wrote:
http://www.wallpaper.com/ - I like the simplicity of it, and the index page which is nice and small
to me, it looks like it was designed by pretentious design school fucks with no soul who live in white rooms... maybe because it was.
Nov 27 2008
#9
888 wrote:
Steven. wrote:
http://www.wallpaper.com/ - I like the simplicity of it, and the index page which is nice and smallto me, it looks like it was designed by pretentious design school fucks with no soul who live in white rooms... maybe because it was.
Regardless of what you think of the designers, it is simple and well-designed.
As other people have said, hosting video and audio would be great, but our traffic is so high that this would cost us a fortune.
I suppose ideally we could collaborate with however Stuart Christie does his new video site, and embed content here like with youtube. The problem with youtube and other sites is that content may be deleted, or removed due to copyright. If we had a decent number of things like this, then it would be impossible to keep track of them all.
That said, audio files using some file sharing service like divshare and just linking to them would be easy enough, especially for things like talks which wouldn't be copyrighted and so wouldn't be deleted.
Nov 28 2008
#10
We can add a field for embedding video - would allow youtube and some other providers, but not allow people to pwn the site - similar to adding images, but you'd stick a link in instead. That'd mean we'd not have to rely on tags for lsting video, and it could be posted alongside other content easily. I wouldn't be averse to adding uploads long term, but that won't be for quite a while probably.
Dec 3 2008
#11
to be fair, anyone who studys or works in design is a soulless cunt who's utterly dead inside.
http://www.wallpaper.com/ - I like the simplicity of it, and the index page which is nice and small