Mercs Announces Website Plans

Today I'd like to go ahead and announce some website upgrades that are coming up down the line.

The web team, the Mandalore, and I have all sat down and discussed what we'd like to do for the site in the way of upgrades. We looked at what was working well, what wasn't, and then on top of that pile of ideas, we put stuff that we wanted to add to the Mercs experience. Much of what we discussed was focused on the user experience. I'd like to take a few paragraphs here and detail what we plan to do, and give in broad strokes an outline of what we're going to be actively working towards over the next year.

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Coming in 2014

Consolidation of Web Resources
One of the first major things to be discussed and approved by all involved in this planning was the need for consolidation of our resources. We will be reformatting the entire site structure so that all aspects of the site are hosted under "mandalorianmercs.org". This gives us a lot of benefits and makes it easier to manage on the back end for our staff. It also will provide for a much needed consistency in our web addresses which has had a tendency to change periodically over the years (originally we had mercs.firespray.net as our only option. Now we have mandalorianmercs.com, etc).


Mercs Website v3.0
A new dedicated website will be crafted to house the forum and all our resources that we use. This will be a dedicated site that will be directly accessible as "Mandalorianmercs.org". We will have frequent updates from the PR team, dedicated pages for CRLs and other downloads such as KTR and BattleCry. It will be a fully realized site like you find when visiting our 501st friend's website. The forums will be attached to it as 'mandalorianmercs.org/forum' as always.


Mobile Applications
We've received a lot of feedback about the growing need for a mobile-ready platform for the Mercs. Most of those ideas sent in have been focused on "an iphone app" or "an android app". While the idea is shiny and sounds wonderful, it would be a task of monumental proportions to get it built, tested, approved, and shipped. And then it would take a mountain of work to keep it updated. On top of that, the group itself wouldn't be benefited directly by any technology that a native app could bring us. It is safe to say that a mobile application for any device is out of the question for our group.

That said, it is our plan to integrate a new easier to navigate layout for the forum that would only be visible to devices with small screens. This would run in your mobile device's browser and let you surf the forum and use the website easily without having to zoom or tilt your screen. There will be more information posted about this in the coming months. Right now things are up in the air a bit on this one, but we can assure you it is coming.



Coming THIS year

Member Database
The big project this year for Comms is the creation of a dedicated Member Database system. Some of you may have already seen news and updates on this in other places, but here I'll lay out some of the broad basics. This system will become our way of handling every aspect of the administration of the club. We'll record events, members, costumes, brigades, and how they are all connected. In addition we'll be creating a front end for our members to use as a kind of personal profile system. Each member will be able to curate data about themselves and their costumes, such as adding biographies for your different characters, tracking your badges and brigade memberships, and uploading photos to a gallery for each character that you own.

This is a huge project, and while it was originally slated to appear in early 2013, the plan now is to have it out sometime over the summer months. As with most of this, that is only a projected date, so testing and other factors may come into play later. We'll announce it if it does.


Bounty Hunt Software
One of the nice things about Celebration VI was the pilot testing of some easy to use software to allow us to digitally track bountys during the Bounty Hunt. While that initial prototype was limited, a future version is going to be much more robust and provide a lot of flexibility for clans. A portion of it will be dedicated to tracking all the required info for a Bounty. Another portion will be the front-end for the convention attendees to use. And yet another is going to be a kind of 'bounty ticker' that will display all the recent bountys taken at that convention. There is a LOT to work on with this, so I don't have a solid date for it yet. My best guess is sometime late this year, possibly around holiday time.


Verd'ika Corps
While it is not one of my own projects directly (I'm assisting setting it up), look for a new sister site for the Mercs to come out this year pertaining to the new Verd'ika Corps which is being worked on by som...

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