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Lately, I’ve been thinking of ways to spiff up the appearance of our blog. Of course, we can’t all be as fancy as Rorate-Caeli. But I do want to draw your attention to several relatively new features of our sidebar, including the list of Catholic booksellers, a list of restaurants frequently patronized by our Society on official outings, and a link concerning our intended pilgrimage to Auriesville in a few weeks.
One of the things I’ve been contemplating is some sort of banner that isn’t just text for our title. I wonder if our readers have any opinions on this. Also, remember that while we may have only a meager quantity of technical skill, our real limitation is in ideas.
St. Louis-Marie de Montfort,
Pope St. Pius X,
St. Joseph,
St. Ambrose of Milan,
St. Thomas Aquinas,
St. Francis (and St. Clare),
St. Catherine of Siena,
St. Alphonsus Ligouri,
St. John Chrysostom,
So we’re devoid of both skill and ideas? Goodness, Iacobe, don’t be overly lavish in our praise!
While Rorate-Caeli is an invaluable source of news and commentary, by no means would I consider them a paragon of web design. The site is busy, and I think, visually unattractive. Whatever we do, I don’t think it should be to emulate the web design aspects of R-C.
That said, I do think a nice banner would add to the site. In my personal opinion, I think we should move away from Blogger and actually do this for real (i.e. with at least Wordpress if not a full-fledge content management system, but that would of course cost some money and I don’t know if we’re willing to do that.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Content is king, even on the web.
The visual on this blog is very attractive; please don’t waste time or money ‘fixing’ it. Spend the time and money going out to a bar and arguing over the content!
I think that between us, we could chip in some dollars and make it happen. How much would it cost?
Well just for reference I own a domain and pay for hosting that runs to about $10 a month ($8 if you prepay for 2 years) with Dreamhost. One nice thing about Dreamhost is that they offer one-click installs of Wordpress, Joomla, phpbb (bulletin board software). Once nice thing about that is that you could run Wordpress for the main blog and move the comments over into a phpbb. I personally vastly prefer a bulletin board to comments on blog posts just because it seems more organized. As an example, Macworld.com runs comments like that. There are a few more advantages I can see:
1) Our own domain name
2) Complete control over layout and content
3) A bulletin board system if we want
4) Full data on traffic, etc.
These are just some ideas.
Rorate Caeli fancy?… Hardly, though I do not consider it busy, either. It seemed a good idea to put most infos on the sidebar. Perhaps the “busy” aspect arises from the changing horizontal banner, though we have only three permanent vertical banners on the sidebar, and the links. As for the colors of the liturgical season and the words under the banner, they are a permanent and specific feature of the site.
Thank you all for your gentle comments.
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As for your blog, I think it looks quite distinguished. Perhaps a banner would be enough. Wordpress is nice, but Blogger has always seemed to me easier to heandle.
…”hAndle”.
These all sound like good ideas. As for me, though, I have not the expertise to move on such a thing; that would be up to Iacobus, Ambrosius and the Doctor. But $10 a month is nothing, between the bunch of us, we can put that together out of our pocket change.
I’m willing to put the thing up front on my card, then collect later, if this is the way we decide to go.
By fancy I meant the nice effort you put into photoshopping all the graphics. I do prefer our design, especially all the color we have.
I am willing to change over to our own site, but the only proper occasion for such a thing is on our first anniversary.
I’ll dish up the cost, and my meager technical skill.
Yes, I would say the whole “structure” of our blog (or its “template”) is primitive, but readers usually remember it, as it is not particularly common.
As a reader, I still think a banner would be enough (or even more than enough) here — the sidebar of Patrons is really wonderful.
Wow! Where have they hidden the Ithaca Texas Roadhouse?
Ah, it’s in Scranton, you see. If you are an Ithacan, surely you could join us in a trip to attend Mass at St. Michaels there, and taste of those delights yourself!
As long as you have Josephus and Jacobus…that is all you need. Their commentary alone is enough.
When is the first anniversary? It’s coming up, isn’t it?
If we want to go with our own domain, the technical aspects wdn’t be too problematic once it’s set up. In other words, once we decide on the back-end infrastructure and put that in place it should be no more difficult to run than blogger, but always with the power behind the scenes to do more advanced/customized things. With something like Dreamhost even putting in place the back-end is pretty easy.
That would be the 23rd of October, good Doctor.
Mind-numb Novus Ordonarian apparatchiks, filled with liturgical grace no doubt, are currently buying the following webnames:
http://www.cornellsocietyforagoodtime.com
http://www.cornellsociety.com
http://www.cornellsocietygoodtime.com
http://www.cornelltrads.com
…to foil your plans to expand your web presence.
By the way, when the Archangel Gabriel appeared to our Lady and said “Hail Full of Grace”, did this include liturgical grace? Did God, by a singular act of grace toward the Blessed Virgin, also fill his holy mother full of the liturgical grace that would only be offered to the rest of the Church in the 1960s?
Our anniversary is easy to remember: we share it with the creation of the cosmos, the universe, the world (in that word’s broad signification).
JSP,
What the heck was that about?
Anon,
Sorry, it was a continued attempt to poke fun at Johnboy across threads. Read the end of the Turkey thread from a few days ago.