Just a few notes on site progress. I’ve been spending time working on the site, but not much of it is visible yet. So here’s a little status update, which I’m posting here mainly just so I can see something new on the front page when I check on the site (I’ve only told a couple people about FFG so far — waiting till I get it a bit more set up before trying to promote it.)
One thing I’m working on is a complete guide to every fruit species that can grow in Florida, listed by family, genus and species. That list will be accessible both as a drop-down menu item in the top bar, and also as a page that has a grid of photos of all species, with each photo linked to the profile page of its species. That’s going to take a while to complete, so it’ll happen bit by bit, species by species.
Another page in the works for the top menu is a guide to botanical names. I want people dropping by the site who are newcomers to plant geek-dom a sort of “welcome mat” to the kind of discussion they’ll be seeing here. That page is nearly done, should be up within a week or so.
One issue I’ve been working on is how to display images, including my Florida Fruit Geek Instagram posts on the site. My stop-gap measure for the moment is that I have a WordPress plug-in installed that’s showing a display of the most recent FFG Instagram posts. That’s okay for now, but I want to figure out a way to have photos, whether grabbed from the Instagram stream or posted directly, more fully integrated into the site, maybe as a gallery.
I know I want to have a bit of a spectrum of post lengths, from long-form posts containing lots of text and multiple images, to short-form “micro-blogging” style posts, which consist mainly of an image with a few words, sometimes up to a few paragraphs, in the style of Facebook and Instagram posts. The question is whether to display all of these in a single feed as blog posts, or whether to have only the longer-form articles appear as “posts”, while the shorter-form ones would appear in a separate area, perhaps as photo items in a gallery, displaying captions with each image.
Another thing I’d like to incorporate would be to have, at the end of each post or static page, especially the species profile articles, a set of links to any other posts that have been made on the site about that species.
And, of course, I want to make sure it all looks good and is easy to navigate on both mobile phones and full-size desktop screens. The current theme is okay, but ultimately I want a theme that’s better suited to the tone of the site.
Well, that’s kind of a laundry list of projects in progress here. Basically, I’m working on building a good foundation for the site, with a layout and visual appearance that are friendly to site visitors, and which give me a good structure to build on as I add content. I look forward to getting to the point of having that structure in place, because I’ve got lots of topics I want to post about here. So once again, stay tuned.
Florida Fruit Geek 