Improving the CAP National Web Site

[JC004]

This one is likely just a dream, but what would you fix about the National web site if you could?

I think that I'd:

• resolve the domain to its root, not "html/index.htm"
• dump the grunge design
• fix the title ".: The Civil Air Patrol:. " - nuke the dots, add "U.S. Air Force Auxiliary"
• dump the excessive use of Adobe Flash
• add detectable RSS feeds
• add social media integration
• dump the tiny content areas with their own little scroll. wth?
• add mobile capability (it's 2010, folks!)
• clean up the domain problem (we have too many)
• make it make sense.  For instance, the FAQ page has an item about whether people are expected to join the military.  CAP is associated with the military?  I can't tell that as a new person looking at it.
• fix the navigation structure and content planning!  seriously!  "CAP National HQ" link?  that's just random departments and stuff...great
• KILL WINDOWS.  VIVA LINUX!  Same goes for ColdFusion.
• get a CMS that creates thumbnails/smaller images...what is with the HUGE images taking all that time to load for a tiny graphic?  Right click on these publication images at the top, open them, and see how huge they are: http://www.capmembers.com/cadet_programs/library/
• get out of a proprietary CMS.  FAIL.
• structure the content on the member pages to make more sense and have more uniformity/better usability
• clearly mark non-web page files (PDF, .doc, .ppt, etc.)  COME ON!
• style the blogs better and auto-detect their RSS feeds
• advanced search would be helpful on a site this large
• blog archive pages, please
• CSS style improvements

There are a bunch of other things that I'd do technologically, planning-wise, structure-related, etc., but that's a start... 

[Eclipse]

RSS = yes.

"Social Media" (whatever that means) = no.

Any decent portable device will render the page just fine, no need for a separate mobile site.

[JC004]

How do you determine a "no" if you don't know what something is?

What qualifies as "just fine"?  Does it have to be navigable?  Does it have to load before the end of the day?  Does the content have to be readable?

[Star-Maker]

A pet peeve - there are some CAP-related sites around the web that link to specific pages on the old (cap.gov) national site.  If I click on any of them, I get redirected, not to the newer-site version of whatever I was trying to get to, but to the front page of the newer site, and then I have to search through it to find what I'm looking for.

I realize that there may not be newer-site analogs to all the old-site links, but it would be nice if everything didn't just redirect to the front page.

I would also add advanced search and dump the excessive use of Flash.  And yeah, better usability in general.

[JC004]

HAHA.  Awesome.  That's one of the first things that I said when they put out the new site. 

Freaking permanent redirects (301 error).  VERY basic professional way to move a site.  VERY easy to do. 

[dwb]

"Social Media" (whatever that means) = no.

While you're welcome to personally boycott technology as you see fit, I support any attempt to bring CAP's marketing efforts (and member news) to whatever venue and format "the kids are using these days".

IMO, we'd do well to distribute information in a manner that matches how current and potential cadets are used to consuming it.

[Eclipse]

What qualifies as "just fine"?  Does it have to be navigable?  Does it have to load before the end of the day?  Does the content have to be readable?

Buy a real phone.

[JC004]

Silly Brodsky, why would we want to be in these places?

Rankings by popularity:
1 http://www.google.com
2 http://www.facebook.com
3 http://www.youtube.com
8 http://apps.facebook.com
19 http://twitter.com
24 http://maps.google.com
27 http://www.myspace.com

[dwb]

8 http://apps.facebook.com

We could write a CAP app for Facebook.  You get points by hastily submitting ill-conceived uniform ideas and new mandatory training requirements to the National Board. 

[JC004]

What qualifies as "just fine"?  Does it have to be navigable?  Does it have to load before the end of the day?  Does the content have to be readable?

Buy a real phone.

My bad.  I didn't realize that.  I'm going to go put notices on all my clients' sites that say "Buy a real phone" for people who want to browse it.

I guess we BlackBerry, iphone, etc. users are a niche market...

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2010/02/google-makes-biggest-gain-in-smartphone-market-share.ars

We could write a CAP app for Facebook.  You get points by hastily submitting ill-conceived uniform ideas and new mandatory training requirements to the National Board. 

Planning on it, actually.  The reason I had was to annoy Bob, though.

[a2capt]

The CMS is probably the reason for a lot of that. My absolute biggest beef with the CMS is the totally LAME disgusting MESS that is done to files that are submitted.

Whatever cheesy A** pathetic company that set this up should be banned from ever doing anything with appropriated funds. So, they managed to at least get the original filenames to be included in this mess. The filenames should not be a big fat mess of random characters when downloaded.

Maybe I live a sheltered internet life (and I sorely doubt that) but I have NEVER come across any other site that behaves like this at all.

As for the list above, I agree with most of it, and the rest I'm indifferent on so might as well say I support the whole thing. The web design is all about bling and hardly anything about functionality. That is supposed to be a resource for our members, and prospective members, not a three ring circus.

It's not exactly easy, nor intuitive to find stuff. Links and such blend in with the busy pages. There is no real structure. Folks complain about lack of a real interface with the IMU, this is about the same problem.



The whole original move was done haphazardly, and I'm pretty sure that on the national level, this stuff is not done by volunteers in total, and thats NOT a slam on volunteers, but rather, I sure hate to know how much money was blown on this thing. Yes, you give the customer what they want, but presumably, being a professional organization, should recommend things like 301 redirects to make transitions mostly seamless to the end user who is the ultimate customer.


This whole argument of we can't do "xxx" in the bounds of the .gov domain is horseradish. Sure they can. They just don't want to. The domain is a big pain in the butt at times, too.


When you try to give it to people, the "go" often gets construed as a command, or action item, not a word/part of the address. As in "go to civil air patrol dot com". Say what you want, but some folks listen too hard, but these are the target users. 

[Eclipse]

Websites native to anything are yesterday's news - you build the best site you can and let the client machines worry about support.

Why not build a gray-scale WAP site while you're at it?

Members need a straight-forward, no nonsense source for documents, news, and related information - that's why the RSS is key. 

What CAP decides to put out for public-facing info I could not care less about beyond it being semi-decent looking so I'm not embarrassed
to send recruits and other outside parties.  Its not like members should be spending a lot of time in there learning what CAP is all about, right?

[Eclipse]

Whatever cheesy A** pathetic company that set this up should be banned from ever doing anything with appropriated funds. So, they managed to at least get the original filenames to be included in this mess. The filenames should not be a big fat mess of random characters when downloaded.

I've never understood that myself, but it seems to be endemic to military document sites in general.

This whole argument of we can't do "xxx" in the bounds of the .gov domain is horseradish. Sure they can. They just don't want to. The domain is a big pain in the butt at times, too.

When you try to give it to people, the "go" often gets construed as a command, or action item, not a word/part of the address. As in "go to civil air patrol dot com". Say what you want, but some folks listen too hard, but these are the target users.

Agree 100% - the idea that the domain name needs to be a marketing tool is 90's thinking as well, complicated "interesting" domains are just easy to forget - besides most people just use Google these days and don't even bother with bookmarks.

cap.gov, short and sweet, hard to forget.  Same goes for those 4-level email subdomains.  Ridiculous, especially when you consider that are not part of an AD or other uniform mail structure, just scattered servers all over the place.

[jimmydeanno]

Cadet Blog does RSS.

My Blackberry Storm views the national page just fine (minus the flash videos).  I don't use the blackberry browser though - I've adopted Opera Mini instead.

However, it is one of the beefier sites to visit.  But, because I have Verizon, my 3G works pretty much everywhere they have coverage.

[N Harmon]

Condense websites into three:

www.gocivilairpatrol.com -- Marketing and recruiting for Civil Air Patrol
www.cap.gov -- Stuff for members like regs, forms, eServices, etc.
www.cap.af.mil -- CAP operational stuff; WMIRS, WMU, IMU, etc.

Get rid of all other domains names, except maybe keep capnhq.gov so as to seperate the paid employees of CAP from the volunteer members/leadership.

Next, all websites should be HTML compliant as well as pass accessibility standards for disabled web users.

Also, require all sites go through usability testing. This is simple; if your 65 year old Major who doesn't have a computer at home can easily navigate your website and isn't confused about the menus, etc... you pass.

That would just be a start... we would move onto standardizing subordinate unit websites and hosting them along with the national site.

[Pylon]

A largely standards-based and widely compliant website would be a huge start. 

As was mentioned, completely dump the entire site framework, and stop using Flash and tables.  The website needs to be using CSS properly instead.   Separate content from design coding.   Tables and Flash don't always render properly and bar a lot of our content from being properly indexed, crawled, and viewed on non-typical, but standards-based browsers (like phones, tablets, etc.).  Ref., see http://www.bu.edu for a great example of separating content from design and proper use of standards and CSS.

[JC004]

Oh, it all goes as far as I am concerned - proprietary CMS first, then the code that's on top of that.  The Windows server goes too.   

[Spaceman3750]

Oh, it all goes as far as I am concerned - proprietary CMS first, then the code that's on top of that.  The Windows server goes too.   

I suppose you're going to pay for them to hire a Linux admin onto the IT team? It's one thing to say "let's get a Linux/Unix/BSD/Whatever" server, but you have to hire the person to support it and ensure its reliability when you do that. The benefit of Windows servers is that they can be pretty straightforward to manage for something as simple as a web server. I suspect that's why they're using it.

[JC004]

Umm...no.  According to the traceroute, it's stored at Rackspace.  Linux servers by far outnumber Windows servers for a reason (or several).  They're not a specialty thing.

[BuckeyeDEJ]

I'd suggest that, like our parent organization, we adopt a site for marketing and recruiting and an "official" site -- the difference between AirForce.com and af.mil -- and that should be the difference between gocivilairpatrol.com and cap.gov (or cap.af.mil, preferably).

As far as gocivilairpatrol.com is concerned, its grunge look and the parchment background (we have one on my wing's Web site, too) doesn't really speak of a professional organization with cutting-edge technology -- the visual message and the written message are confused/confusing. Parchment colors with a cracked-up look would be great for the CAP Historical Foundation, though.

Hopefully, the folks overseeing the national marketing strategy will see a need to tie the public Web site to the rest of our marketing communications, and that it will all look consistent and have the same message, or variations upon it. A good, simple, easy-to-remember slogan should drive the whole thing.

Just a few unofficial thoughts for the sake of discussion among us barracks lawyers.

By the way, I'm seeing this slashie over the triangle logo all over CAPTalk now. I see the criticism is more widespread than I thought....