With all these new websites, I wanted to take a moment to mention some things that the Club volunteers & the webmasters are working to employ across the Club & our sites.
The generally understood website design principle of "clean design", flow & an appropriate amount of "white space" or open space between pieces of information is being used in the Club. It was agreed between myself & David Guégan the primary lead webmasters for the Club & in agreement with Pierre D & Walt Moehle, the other primary webmasters, that such a concept would be used throughout all Club pages. This includes a future editing of the main Club pages to employ this, which will be the next task that David & I tackle together.
This concept is used for various reasons. It uses images, colors of font, backgrounds & other parts that make up a website, to create a design that is easy to use and also easy for folks to navigate. People use a wide variety of browsers & systems to get here, they also have a wide variety of personal elements they bring with them, when visiting a site. Things that are visual, like their eye sight quality, their ability to see different colors clearly or focus on things. Things that are environmental or personal choice related, like what type of browser & system they are using, their setup of their computer system, is it a large monitor, is it a laptop, a tablet or even a cell phone. Cell phone use has increased for our visitors to our sites, something that Pierre D has noted. It also includes their choice to use or not use certain more advanced scripting on websites, such as Java or other things that can be employed in site design to enhance a site.
As technology continues to evolve & as standards & trends change over time, as a webmaster, you have to always try to meet the needs of your audience as much as possible. As things grow & change, many companies & websites across the internet, have gone back to simpler, more basic "clean design" concepts. It was felt, by myself & David, when redesigning the sites that this was important to moving the Club forward into the future . It also creates a somewhat overall look to the Club at large. The use of images to create a certain "brand" or feel/identity for a page is important, but also are their uses to create focal points for how someone reads a page or sees it. They are also used to divide parts of a page up too, to create a structure to them. They are also fun too, which makes it all the more worthwhile, as people like them & it adds to the Clubs appeal to potential members. Icons & leader images, banners & graphics are all things that set our pages a part from others. They are all things that add that extra appeal to visitors. As Jim Hall says, "eye candy"! I couldn't agree more & I know a lot of folks agree too. Like I alluded to in the AAA post, we are a visual organization, people process what they see & feel about us with their eyes, visually, as a major part of what we do.
Music on pages also adds an extra layer to a site. We were careful to not quite overload with it. The Prussian & Russian music choices had a lot of variety. We only used one song on the Austrian site in their OOB. The AAA, we used two, as a lot of the music in the Battleground games for them sounded the same, so we didn't want each page to have the same audio sound when someone clicked on them. Of course things might change over time, but we felt that this overall was good for the music & marches added to the site.
Many times, tons of visitors come, but we don't hear from them, but they take away who we are & what we look like based, partly, off of our websites. They then spread that around to other friends & places in various forums, emails & what not. So our "brand" of our sites & Club are important to us. So a lot of thought is being placed into these pages. a lot of these ideas have been employed elsewhere by myself, David & others, but are also easily seen & read about across the internet. It is our mission, as the webmasters, to give our Club, the best visual image possible. We think in the long run it'll pay off for us.
Other lesser important, but critical concepts are used, such as page load times, images sizes & site hierarchy structure, that David & I work to make sure flows properly. I've been a part of other Clubs, that I've taken over doing website work for & their site hierarchy's were a mess. I kind of just enforced structure where I could. But with our army pages moving locations & fresh designs being employed, both David & I are doing as much as we can to make sure that the hierarchy is as clean as possible.
Also we are doing a variety of things to help with the ability for people to find us via search engines. A fair amount of our traffic comes from Google itself. So we'll be looking at ways to maintain that, while expanding visibility in more particular places & venues.
The other thing we wanted to highlight, in particular for the Coalition, is force structure. The "Contingent" name brand, has been removed from the various forces. The Coalition itself has also been re-branded too. It is now called, simply, The Allied Coalition. With in it, two forces were raised to the Army level again. The Anglo-Allied Army, which uses the proper historical & recognizable term for that array of forces in it. It then employs various Corps' underneath it, that as I mention in the AAA Site post are based on historical & Club tradition lines, as well as national identities. All done to create a feel for the members and offer that important Esprit de Corps to them. The other force raised to the Army level again is the Austro-Prussian-Swedish Army. As I allude to in that post, about that force, it is more done along the lines of administration needs/practices, easier management of the forces & pages, as well as redundancy in leadership, that allows things to continue if someone gets busy in real life. Under that level is the individual Austrian, Prussian Corps' & the Swedish Brigade, which I may raise to at least a division soon. These three forces, in the 1813/14 Campaigns, historically had a lot of unit & leader intermixing, so it was an ideal decision to group them all together originally and that concept & the practices have prevailed to make them more viable forces these days. The last force in the Coalition is the Russian Corps. The Russian commanders wanted to keep their force at a Corps level, as they are smaller in number and they liked the concept of it & how it worked for them. We of course were happy to follow their wishes & simply worked with them to make small improvements to their website & get their approval & input on things. In the end all of these decisions were made by the Coalition volunteers & staff, to ensure that the members have the best possible experience & the most options for them. They are also done out of respect of the individual commanders wishes & their feelings of what works best for their forces.
People might argue that things are too large. The school of thought, that folks spread out across units & not having direct commanders and all is of a person's mind we feel. If you create a culture of strong central command system, supported by volunteers from across the board, you can actually have a more effective & personal experience for the Club members. The amount of cooperation, communication & collective leadership & agreement that goes on, rather daily in the Coalition since November of last year has been not seen in the Coalition, well as long as I've been in it for 12 years. It seems you can have your individual army realms, while still having a larger Coalition concept. The amount of work being done for the members in this period, made the need for the Coalition volunteers & staff to have their input for their forces as well as mutual respect & agreement amongst each other as the keys to success.
I have always said, tone is what drives the Club in many ways. The tone the volunteers & staff of the Club set, trickles down the ranks and is visible in the forums too in many ways. The volunteers & staff of all sides of the Club agree that motivating the members, giving them options & sometimes participation in these various development processes, helps make a Club, such as ours, with a wide variety of people from over the world a very appealing & workable place. The way we see it is, this war was truly international in so many ways. There were a lot of obstacles both the French & Coalition had to overcome. Especially the Coalition with the very different nations & leaders in it. Personal & national interests had to be weighed, overcome & kept in check in the history of the Wars. The Coalition took a long time to navigate these many issues. But they eventually were able to overcome them & that is evident in their battlefield performances & accounts of the staff planning and all that from 1813 forward. Many of these historical concepts, take root in our very global Club. We think in many ways, like the Wars themselves, different stages had to happen for us to arrive at this point. We think the Club is at a good point now. We think the Coalition is really coming into it's own & is gaining a cohesion, that it sort of lacked before. The Coalition is a hard thing it give identity to, but we hope, in time, it'll become evident to the members, the work & tone that the volunteers & staff are setting.
It also helps, we think, that the Club volunteers & staff, currently in commands, are not only folks who in many cases have known each other a long time, are also friends & have worked together for years in many other settings. We also think it further helps that the volunteers & staff are from several different nations across the world, cultural backgrounds & even within those nations different personal & regional backgrounds too. Mixed in with different age levels, temperaments & personal/technical skills, as well as professional backgrounds, it creates a wide cross section, that allows for the best possible combinations for Club leadership. This creates a system of checks & balances, in which some are actively being done too, such as the sharing of different administrative responsibilities, that then sets a tone for the Club at large, focuses on the individual member experience, as well as that of the different forces & the Club at large. It is our hope, that as time goes on, these cornerstones will help the Club grow & propel it into a new, great chapter of it's own history.
The volunteers & staff always value the input of the members & we all have an open door policy.
This is your Club! To quote what is written in the crest of the Prince of Wales, in German, "Ich dien", which is shorthand for "I Serve". That's what we are all here for, as your Club volunteers & staff!