Jamie Horner
Administrator
| Joined: | Tue Sep 10th, 2019 |
| Location: | Iowa USA |
| Status: |
Offline
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Hello Fans of fans,
Our AFCA President, Annie and the Board of Directors have asked me to put together a roadmap of the plans for updating the AFCA (fancollectors) Website and to share them with all of you.
First things first, the name of the Association is not changing. We are all fan collectors of some sort and it was thought best to stick with what is familiar to most and just grow our Association from there. Along with that, our domain name (Web address) will not be changing. We unfortunately share our initialism (AFCA) with the (probably much less well known) American Football Coaches Association, so there will unlikely be a time that we are ever able to purchase AFCA.org. We will be sticking with fancollectors.org for the foreseeable future.
Now with those decisions finalized, it’s on to branding ourselves with a little more consistency than we currently demonstrate. Our first item on the agenda will be logo creation. Some consistency is needed throughout the organization and that consistency will begin with the creation of our new logo. The branding process has already begun and all materials will be presented to the members of the Association upon approval from the Board. We have realized the need to be more inclusive of the many different types of fan collectors out there and the branding is being planned around that goal.
Along with the branding, we all realize that it’s time to start making some changes to the current look, structure and content of the Website. The structure of our branding will be guiding the new look for the site. Our goal is to no longer have the site remain only desktop, laptop or tablet friendly, but to make it very mobile friendly as well. This means an entire rewriting of the code that is the current structure for the site. This will not be a one weekend or overnight accomplishment.
The initial plan is to rewrite the areas of the site that are accessible to both members and non-members (currently, the areas to which no passwords are needed to gain access). This is not something that can be done without a lot of discussion, planning and forethought. Please bear with us as we continue to figure out exactly what is best for all in order to draw more traffic to the site and make it much more easy to navigate and search.
Once the “all-access” end of the Website has been completed, we will connect that to the current forum and then start to look at how we might improve the forum to be a little more “new-user” and mobile friendly.
As a final phase, we will be rebuilding the forum and attaching that to the rebuilt “all-access” part of the site. This will likely be the part of the process that will be the most time intensive.
Just remember, this is all being done to make our Association, more attractive, easier to navigate for information, and much more mobile friendly for all. Approximately 51% of people worldwide currently only access the internet via their smartphone. It is estimated that within the next 4 years, the number will increase to 73%. I think we need to be ready for that.
None of this will happen overnight and it is currently being planned in stages that we hope will be the least disruptive to all. If you have any questions or suggestions, please submit those to the Board of Directors for answers or consideration.
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