Digital Imaging Group
December 2019
to display their images and engage with other like-minded photographers. Because I made a nuisance of myself, I was invited to become a member of the new website stakeholder committee. With other members we made suggestions to the developers and HQ staff about how to make improvements. Sadly, few of these suggestions have come to pass. For example, I think existing members found the navigation difficult at first. Groups, Chapters and Regions are not instantly located on the RPS homepage, you must do a little work to find them under the ‘About’ header. There was a perception that the old homepage needed fewer “tabs” and everyone had to “suffer” a little bit. We suggested that navigation to Groups, Regions and Chapters should be front and centre, but we were overruled. At the end of this article I will provide several DIG shortcut links you can save as Bookmarks. I initially struggled to understand how to create pages on the new website, but at one point I had a “lightbulb” moment and then it was all downhill from there. I now give advice to other web editors – along the lines of functionality rather than how a page will look. I’m not much of a “creative”, after all. With the old website, you could write and add content as you went along, but now you must prepare your work in advance. You gather your “media” together, work out how you want it to look, and build the blocks to populate a page. These blocks are called “cards” in the system we use, and there are several different types. Whilst this has the benefit of making the website look more uniform, or as I say, a “corporate style” it can be a bit restrictive. There were some things I would have liked to have done but couldn’t. But despite that, there is room for some scope. There are one or two features that baffle me – for instance, if you add an image to a “card”, it will produce a coloured border and background for the text. Now this border colour is supposedly chosen by matching the colour in the image to one of the colours in the rainbow footers you see on every page. Although why I got a purple background with a black and white image I tested, I will never know….. I think HQ has missed a couple of tricks with the new website. I know it’s old hat in this day and age, but I think there is a place for a forum in a society that has members. I suspect each SIG has its Facebook/Instagram pages, but it’s not the same. There should be opportunity for members to converse across all parts of the Society. Secondly – Gallery pages. COO Mike Taylor said that there are other websites that show off images better; but we are a photographic society – we should be able to present our work in the best possible manner. Disappointed. On the day of the launch, there was the usual problems of being able to log on etc. I was able to re-establish my account, but when I tried to gain access later, the website was obviously overloaded, so I left it. I think there might still be teething troubles, but it’s not life and death.
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