Pro Bono Youth Radio Review

A technical review YouthRadio.org, newly relaunched in Drupal.

Design

• Give it a favicon (a little icon in the browser address bar)
• The header could take up less room— as little as one third the space if you wanted to be aggressive about it. As it is a content-rich site, you'll want to do something to make more content show on smaller screens. Overlapping the logo down over the menu as I eventually prevailed upon Dan to do at http://agaricdesign.com/ could get the visual effect and save the space.

Functionality

• You need RSS feeds!!! Just set some or all content to be promoted to the front page (which you are obviously overriding anyway, heh!) and you'll get a main feed for free from Drupal functionality. All Views listings can also produce an RSS feed. Fortunately, Drupal does this for terms automatically, and RSS is working for all topics.
• Consider replacing ReCaptcha with Mollom or Akismet to allow commenters to be presumed innocent until reasonable suspicion of spaminess– with Mollom, there is no CAPTCHA at first but if a post is suspected of being spam, the user is given a the CAPTCHA. Akismet simply flags potential spam for administrator review.
• The login form, while absolutely gorgeous by Drupal standards, is rather prominent for a site that doesn't allow people to register yet: http://youthradio.org/user/register gives access denied.
• Taxonomy Manager could help you combine accidentally created topics (terms) such as eduacation (which should become Education.
• The three links under Get Involved all go to the same page, and don't select the category either. JQuery could preselect the appropriate gategory or you could split the contact page into several– this tutorial to do so is Drupal 6, however.
  Better, you could make multiple contact forms with lots more options with the excellent Webform module.
• The large static pages for Staff and Board of Directors could be replaced with Views of profile content types, that could be edited individually and even maintained by the people themselves. (In general the about section lacked some photos, and generating pages from profiles that would have photos could help. Contributors could then have profiles using the same system. Clearly priority was given to content during development and that is very good.

I'm sure there has been tons of discussion but I'd be interested in hearing about information architecture decisions, how consciously you're deciding what to feature, etc., so we'll throw some of these notes under miscellaneous...

Miscellaneous:

• National Network, Science & Technology, Politics, Youth Culture, Music are prominent on the front page but appear in no other navigational elements throughout the site?
• For instance, the topic Science and Technology gives a very different result (just one article) than the half-dozen featured in the front-page linked section Science and Technology. Some more careful, or even automatic, tagging may be recommended here.
• "Web Radio" seems to be, in fact, a little under-emphasized, and the only way to get to a show's page is through the links on the calendar?
• The Latest News that slides open on the right side of the election coverage page is unexpectedly to external articles.
• Perhaps the audio players could be featured on teasers as well as content pages themselves, although this could make the problem of navigating away from playing content worse rather than better. Should one or some of the audio streams be featured on the front page?

Again, overall, very, very nice. The Share links are excellent and very slick. It's visually appealing and clear throughout. Search has new content so cron is set up and working, the top link under the drop-down menus goes to the same place as the menu item itself (since many people will neglect to click on the main link once the dropdown appears), Drupal is up-to-date at 5.11, and in general any of the gotchas I can think of are well taken care of.

I did not log in as a user or an administrator for this review, so it is superficial, by the very definition of the term.

Resolution