When this site originally was devised we had a few goals. At the forefront we wanted to enable communication between everyone in Springfield, IL and its surrounding cities. Craigslist had a feature like this, but everyone either had to communicate via new thread or emailing directly. SJ-R has a comments section, but most of the communication got lost between the actual stories comments.

We originally set out to correct this, unfortunately along the way we lost sight of the goals and started adding additional features that weren’t really needed to run a community board. We had a chat room, groups pages, events calendars, rss feeds, news,  and all other things that could be made more readily available on other sites.

This made us think about the actual goal of this site a bit more, instead of focusing on things that other sites did well, we should focus on the primary goals of this site. Because of this we have converted our main page into a sort of highlights reel. Anything that goes on around this site can be promoted more efficiently through news and stories. These stories will be written by members of this site as well as pulled in from the back end of this site.

When I say back end I really mean the heart of what this site is supposed to be about. Our goals led us to use a forum to help convey the community aspect of the website. With the forum layout, the articles, groups, events on that forum can be read by what we would like to call our “staff” and important and interesting articles can have their own place on the front page.

The redesign was a complete overhaul and I do apologize for the lack of updates to the viewers but the overall goal of the redesign was to simplify the interface as well as promote more people to get on and chat. We noticed that the primary users of the website were people putting on events. This was great, but there are many many other calendars available on large customer based sites that this service already exists. We are going to keep these services but really want to promote a community feel. This is why we chose to consolidate all of our features to two parts. The front page, news style website, and more importantly, our forums.

The forums will give a place for people to communicate with each other, discuss events, and groups in a simplistic open way. Before we had all these sections separated and the ammount of links on the page started increasing. This caused an almost clustered feeling on this website. To remedy this, we have consolidated our links to the basics. A registration page, a front page, and a set of forums with topics.

I feel this choice will improve how everyday users are taking advantage of this site. Before I feel that the primary goal was to promote, and we still want to keep this feature, but we also would like to promote use of the forum overall. Everything has been consolidated to this forum look to help facilitate this.

If you have any questions about this site, feel free to leave a comment on the article, or inside the forums. There is also