What happened to the portal?

As you can see we’ve made a number of significant improvements to the Greenstone Community Portal.  We’ve been listening to the community, and we’ve taken what we’ve heard and made the changes you wanted. 

Finding Things

To address the issue of making things easier to find, we’ve reorganized the site into four major sections.  The homepage now presents you with links to just these four sections and provides a description as your mouse hovers on each choice.

Once you select a section, you only see menu options at the left for the section you are in.  This pattern carries deeper into the site as you go.   The same four section buttons are available at all times at the top left corner of each page, allowing you to jump to a different area. 

Between this top area and the navigation links down the left, there is a “breadcrumb trail” that gets larger as you go deeper into the site.  This will allow you to jump back to a higher level page, or to note where you are currently in the site.

A basic search function is now included that rapidly provides meaningful results from across the portal.   The search page will be expanded in the near future to provide even more options. 

Speed

We have also made a number of changes that have resulted in a MUCH faster response time while browsing the site.  The system is currrently running on a reduced number of servers within the portal sytem, while futher maintenance is in progress.  You will continue to see improvements in the weeks ahead, as the migration back to the full production system takes place.

Content and Editing 

Editing the content of the sites within the portal is now far more flexible and easy for the members of various community groups, organizations and businesses who look after each area.  If you notice something inaccurate or missing, please contact that particular group that the content is related to directly.  Groups who have not had their orientation and training session on content maintenance yet can contact us to setup an appointment .

Individual Businesses

Businesses still get one year of free hosting and now have the freedom to choose from hundreds of templates or develop something custom.   The options are virtually limitless as to what features can now be included, while still keeping it easy for a business to maintain its own content. 

Ongoing Improvements

It is most important that you, the community, continue to provide feedback to us on what you like and don’t like so that we can plan for and make the changes you want to see.  We are always looking for people with good ideas, and will assist anyone with setting up a spot in the portal for any community interest group or organization, big or small.

Jay Lucas, Portal Administrator
jay.lucas@greenstone.ca
807-854-2335 ext. 231