Late in 2008, core members met and asked around on how the website should be structured. This page has the conslidated and evolved suggestions that resulted from this input gathering exercise.

Site Layout

Home Page

Landing page should be simple and designed for casual visitors, not the regular members or readers. It should have:

1. What is Praja.in - Mission
2. Praja Help - to get the non-tech savvy folks started
3. Short description with Link to the page that summarizes discussions via various indexes
4. Link to the forums.
5. Short description and link to Gyan (Praja Library)
6. Link to the registration page, along with a writeup describing the features for registered members
7. Further, the page can have links to the city index pages on Praja

What is Praja

Praja mission statement, and a link to the "Praja FAQ". The FAQ needs more entries.

How to get started

This section will be the "Praja Help" book. The book needs to have clear separate page on how to get started on PRaja.in

Forums

Should be the forums as they are. They should be reorganized to be generic and ot Bangalore specific

Praja Library - Gyan

Main page of the library needs a clear description of what should be posted here and what should be posted in forums

Forum index page

This would be where we categorize discussions by groups like "action", "analysis" etc.

Usability inputs

Ease of registration

It should be easy and quick to register. User name and email address should be considered enough. Email confirmation is required, thought it does slow the process down as user has to open email and then come back to the site.

Blogs vs Forums

It is confusing to have both. Do away with the concept of Blogs (or do vice versa). But, there must be a page for every member where all "posts" made by the member are listed. Members are to provide link to this page on their Praja activist cards.

Member rights on the site

• Right now (Jan 2008), all members can post in forums, some members (praja points > 150) can blog. Sometimes, members are manually promoted to "bloggers"
• One must register to comment. Allowing all visitors to comment will lead to more comments, but is likely to bring down the "quality" and increase the moderation workload.
• Further, to raise the bar of seriousness for Forums, we can have a system where members automatically get right to post in forums after they have posted at least 5 comments.
• Members with 100+ Praja points should get increased rights like uploading images and files, and creating polls and projects

City index pages

Filtered content

Content on city entry page should be similar to the forum index described above. Just that all content will be filtered by the given city