COA Websites – Techniques of Digital Heraldry

Google Searches for the CoA Website

For more than a decade, the state of the art for searching the LoARs has been “go to Morsulus.org and run a Google search.”

We can improve on that by using Google’s “Programmable Search Engine” tool, which lets you customize some search engine parameters and then embed a widget on your own page. (This system is already in use for the name-articles search on Morsulus.org, but not the LoAR search.)

This isn’t the final answer to searching the LoARs — in the long run we can improve on this with a custom-coded tool that understands the structure of our letters — but it’s something that can be deployed with little effort, and I think it is an advance over what we have today.

Imagining a New Look for OSCAR

As noted a couple of weeks ago, I recently set up a working mirror of the SCA’s Ordinary & Armorial that incorporates the look and feel of the College’s main website, and tonight I wondered whether the same idea could be extended to the College’s commentary tool, OSCAR.

(I have no mandate to redesign OSCAR, and little sense either of the effort involved or whether such a venture would appeal to the system’s primary developer or the community that uses it, so this should be understood to be purely a matter of idle speculation.)

The resulting mockup includes just six pages: the home page, the list of active letters and that of kingdom letters, the tracking grid, a sample search result, and one sample letter (with commentary expunged).

First Round of Updates to the CoA Website

Over the last few days, two updates have been deployed to the heraldry.sca.org website by Reis ap Tuder, the Codex Herald.

Most noticeably, the larger sans-serif typeface and responsive styling for small screens discussed in last month’s post about Enhanced Readability for the CoA Website are now live.

Secondarily, the first round of updates from the Proposed Navigation Changes for the CoA Website have been applied, creating a new “About Us” page that combines the contents previously found under the “Jobs” and “Links” choices in the main navigation menu.

Prototyping a New Look for the O&A

As part of my ongoing efforts to prototype possible changes to the College of Arms website, I’ve applied a related set of stylistic changes to my local mirror of the SCA’s armorial database.

Under the hood, this site is running a fork of the main O&A codebase (along with a custom local configuration file), so the core functionality is the same, but a number of changes have been made to the user interface throughout.

Site-Wide Visual StylE

The most obvious changes are to the overall appearance of the site.

Enhanced Readability for the CoA Website

As part of an ongoing effort to update the SCA’s heraldry website, I spent some time this afternoon working on a set of proposed changes to improve the site’s readability.

The existing design hasn’t been significantly updated since it was rolled out more than a decade ago, which leaves it out of synch with two significant changes in computing equipment that occurred over the intervening years:

On the desktop, pixel resolutions increased faster than screen sizes, with the result that many displays moved from 72dpi to 96dpi, and a line of text that is 16 pixels high now appears smaller than it used to.
Mobile devices have moved from the margins to play a key role of the information ecosystem, and it’s entirely commonplace for a website to be viewed on a screen that’s only three inches wide.

As a result, the current CoA website can be difficult to read in both circumstances:

Proposed Navigation Changes for the CoA Website

The SCA’s heraldry website is a critical resource for the armorists, onomasticians, and administrators that staff the College, and for the members of the populace who want to develop names and armory for their own personae.

However, the site’s organization and navigation haven’t been substantially updated in more than a decade, and a number of weaknesses have become apparent in the course of the site’s heavy usage:

Thoughts on Updating the CoA Website

I’ve been thinking about potential improvements that could be made to the heraldry.sca.org website so that it’s more useful to heralds and the populace.

Here are some notes about this effort based on what I’ve learned so far.

Top-Line Objectives

There are three main avenues for improvement, as discussed further below.

Appearance
- Improve the site’s readability on modern mobile and desktop devices.
- Refresh the site’s appearance and give it a more “contemporary” feel.
Organization
- Make it easier for non-heralds and new heralds to find key information.
- Reduce effort for experienced heralds to reach key “hot-spot” resources.
Education
- Link to more Internet reference material frequently used by heralds.
- Clarify whether articles are authoritative, incomplete, or out of date.

A Sketch of Possible Changes for the CoA Website

I spent some time today sketching out a possible overhaul of the heraldry.sca.org website, at coa-freshness.digitalherald.org.

Obviously this is very incomplete, but hopefully it can serve as a reference point for conversations about possible future work.

It mixes together two different kind of changes, which I think make sense to tackle all together, but which could be undertaken individually.