forum.blind-guardian.com

I wasn't a member of the old Following for very long, so I can't remember the way they organized everything. I imagine there will be a lot of overlap with the way we handle content like interviews/photos/etc, but other than that, I don't think we should try to create a 1:1 mimic of the old site anyway. So, I propose we discuss structure here.

For the ignorant, a site map is a hierarchical list of categories/sections of the website. It doesn't necessarily mean that to get to a section of a website you have to follow through to its parent section first. It's just a general overview. As suggestions come in, I'll keep this first post updated on the current site map.

Here is what I have so far:

1. Home
2. News
   
   1. Whatever categories we sort news into...
      
3. Discography
   
   1. All albums and singles
      
      1. Lyrical Analysis
         
      2. Tabs
         
      3. Reviews
         
      4. Etc...
         
4. Gallery
   
   1. Sort by concerts/artwork/fanart/etc...
      
5. Followers
   
   1. A list of "followers" with each person filling out and adding all sorts of information to their own little profile.
      
6. Etc...

Probably missing a lot of stuff and everything also needs to be reorganized, so feel free to suggest anything!

We should probably have a "band" section too, with maybe a short biography of the band and some info about each of the main members, the main guest musicians (Oliver and Mi) and the ex-member. Especially the info about the members seems important to me, since for whatever reason they took all of them out when they made the new website design, that leaves the fan who wants to know with pretty much nothing. I think we could use all the general info, the "favourite..."s and "did you know?"s from the old website plus add some new stuff or elaborate categories that already existed (e.g. equipment).

I'd suggest that interviews get either get their own section, or get put under the band section that Desert_Storm suggested.

Maybe we could like split the interviews up and distribute them over the band/discography section, like having the interviews concerning an album right next to that album, interviews with single members of the bands next to their "profile page", something like that. That's just completely off-the-cuff now, I have no idea how practical that would be.

good idea, I'd still get an dedicated section for Interviews, though, to get quick access to all interviews available.

And put the date by each link to make it even easier.

just categorise all interviews - date, person interviewed, album, such stuff, and give the possibility to sort by those categories (and link to them from the different subsections - like make all Hansi interviews accessible from the "Hansi"-page in the band section, and all interviews to an album from its discography-page.

We could try the same for stuff like fanart and pictures.

The person uploading the data should be able to tag it with some given "headlines", and a staff member can change/correct them afterwards.

You should put something that says the Following is being rebuild for now.

um...a forum. and links to their FB and twitter.

We have a forum, noticed? Actually two, if the one that arwen made still exists, plus this one. And facebook links are hardly site-map related

The skeleton should be up some time next week or the week after (latest). After that, we can criticize it to hell and actually start building on top of it.

Maybe articles/concert reviews section would be a good idea as people could write about BG expierence from their point of view...

PS. I know I've got few posts, but I'm here and into BG for a while now