Good Morning Friends,
I am commenting on some changers in the format and I wish to compliment those responsible, great job.

Respectfully,

Ralph Jones

Thanks Ralph. I work with Lauren and Rikki. I'm the technical person.

We will be implementing small changes and fixes to the website as a whole and to the forum for the first few weeks. We will be fixing broken links and generally cleaning up the presentation and readability of the website.

Lauren has been working for the laast couple of weeks on a new and re-vamped bookstore. We have hooked that onto the website. It looks a bit plain right now, but it works, is open for business, has good product and will be actively managed and extended. We aim for it soon to be the most comprehensive and authorative resource for in-print books on the internet.

Lauren has also gathered an extensive library of out of print and collectable books on the arts and crafts movement. A small sampling of these are published on www.antiquehome.org. But, in the medium or long term, look for more to come.

We (especially Rikki) have also been working on a fresh new website design and we will be integrating that sometime in the month of August.

We are also working on other sections of the website. We hope to build the Marketplace and we are assembling the software support and process to make it work. We will soon be contacting current and past advertisers as well as new prospective advertisers. We hope to build the Marketplace to be a current and valuable resource for the community and a source of revenue to help support the costs of the website.

For the forum, we will be looking, at first, to make small, superficial improvements only. Our focus will be on doing everything we can to promote an active, open and useful forum for the community.

The new look is great... I look forward to seeing the forum grow.

It is great to see such active participation by all involved. This website has great potential as a resource for the Movement and those who worked during the period.

Hello Fred,
I am excited about the way things are starting to shape up with the format changes and I know that you as well as myself have quite a bit to offer to the new forum.

I have my drawings and some different pictures that might be interesting. Also we can remind folks visiting or even member who have not seen the History that I wrote and you consolidated it into one package. I hope they will allow us the power that we now have to help keep this forum clean by deleting unwanted Spam.

AS you know I am also the Arts and Crafts Furniture forum host on WOOD ON LINE which can be found by keyword www.woodmagazine.com then on to the forums.

Sorry to be so long winded.

Respectfully,

Ralph Jones

Thank you Canwright,
For your comments on our comments about the new change and we appreciate all you folks are doing.

If there is anything that I and Fred can do to assist with different ideas, just let us know.

Take pictures for instance, I am not with a special gallery program and all of my picture come out so you can click on to open the picture. This is fine but I wonder if it would be possible to allow us to browse for more pictures in the same post? Also to have the function of placing them within the post instead of waiting to the end?

Thank again for what you folks are doing.

Respectfully,

Ralph Jones

We have been discussing enhancing ease of posting pictures on the forum.

My company has a lot of experience with that. Look at the portfolios of some of these websites for examples of what we can do:

http://www.karenford.net/projects/josephine/
http://www.osbornearchitects.com/projects/shaw/
http://barber.canright.ws/residential/miller-residence/

We know how to produce nice image slideshows and we know how to allow people to easily build and upload the images for them.

But, we still have to figure out how to integrate it into the forum in an easy to use way. The forum is executed with a third party product (Eve), which we have to learn more about to see how best to do this.

We are also exploring integrating to flicker as another alternative.

Hello Canright,
I looked at the three links and I like the first one best as you can have one showing and x number attached on the side or across the bottom. Having a set up like that one would be nice if one were able to install certain ones within the body of the post rather that at the end as some folks loose the point if they have to wait till the end to see the picture.

Respectfully,

Ralph Jones

I'm thinking we provide a way to easily add a link to a post. And, people viewing the post could just click on the link to see the slideshow in a pop-up window.

The poster would upload the images in another section (which might stand on its own as galleries of images). Maybe the images could be captioned by the person posting them. Then, we could provide an easy way to paste the link to an image or to a slideshow into a post on the forum.

Also, we might be able to show a thumbnail for the image or an entire image inline directly in the post (rather than a link).

We still have to explore what is possible in Eve, but it is likely that we will be able to do these kinds of things.

All these possibilities sound interesting. Easy posting should peak interest. I like the idea of thumnail images that would link to larger more detailed images.

Fred

We are still at work on the first stage - which is a quick pass through the website to make superficial but important fixes. You will see that we are fixing the layout and navigation of the site and that we are almost finished with that. Soon we will go through and fix all broken links. We will also go through all the pages and make sure they have proper titles and html syntax.

We are also working on a fresh look for the website - I'll post a link to a draft of our proposed new lookup soon and invite comments.

Also, we should have a prototype for the forum enhancements (particularly enhancements to make it easy to post and review images, thumbnails and slideshows) within the next couple of weeks.

Hello Canright,
When I opened the forums today I was taken aback as you or whom ever made the format changes with the border, there is only one slight change that I can see might need a little playing with as the OD green is a little dark for some letters, being blue and black.

If the green color was a light green all would be easy to read. That is for us old timers.

Respectfully,

Ralph Jones