New Yeah! Hackney for 2014

General chat

You will probably have noticed some changes to the site. This is part of an overall refresh and a chance to make the site a bit easier to use.

The main changes that you will see

  • a logo change
  • posting is faster and easier
  • more chances to add images
  • a more self service events listing
  • more comprehensive search
  • email notifications

I have a made short screencast of some of the changes, to help explain some of the main changes:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMyHEY93SuM

Please note that comment subscriptions won’t work retroactively, so if you want to keep up to date with a thread, even if you have commented before the change, click the subscribe without commenting link.

For the slightly more techie of you, I’ve pulled a few database tables apart and put the back together moving a lot of content from BuddyPress to WordPress structure.

Please let me know what you think, or add your questions in the comments box below.

I will also have missed some bits, so if something doesn’t seem right, let me know and I’ll try and fix it.

Thanks
Emily

19 Comments

  1. Big thanks to @mattyc @quitepeculiar @saladefolle @stephenwalker78 @jystewart for the testing and feedback

  2. sorry if you all got a double email when I tagged you, I think that shouldn’t happen again now

  3. Great work @ewebber – you are the Queen of Hackney! X

  4. Looks great! The events posting changes look particularly helpful 🙂

    • Thanks Caroline 🙂

  5. I love the community spirit of Hackney! Thank you for putting in such effort to make this space easier to use for the community. But I must state that I am put off by the new logo. It is very clearly a white person’s hand. Is that the most inclusive icon we can use for this diverse community?

    • Hi Claire, I’d be genuinely interested to know what colour the hand should be, to best demonstrate the diversity of the borough?

  6. Hi Claire, thanks for the comment. I went through a lot of iterations of the hand. The outline is based on a real hand. The person who the hand belongs to isn’t white, but I chose it for shape rather than any other factor. I felt orange was not related closely enough with any real skin tone, but maybe I was wrong. Is it the colour you are referring to?

  7. Hi Yeah! Hackey-ers, the last icon was grey with the bright green Hackney ‘tattoo’. So while it referred to a person’s hand, the focus was on the Hackney symbol. It seems like this new symbol puts a stronger emphasis on the hand. To my eye, the hand looks like it’s a “peach/apricot” colour and strongly indicates that it is a thumbs-up from a white person (albeit a white person as a school child might draw one – with a peach crayon). Were you able to get any feedback from Hackney locals while you were designing the new symbol?

    Without something like the Hackney-tattoo to focus on, the take-away message of the Yeah! Hackney symbol entirely rests on that hand, and consequently what kind of hand is a ‘Hackney Hand.’ Perhaps returning to a monochromatic or blatantly-not-skin-colour pallet would move the attention back to the message of the symbol: “Thumbs up!” A message that I fully endorse! Cheers

    • Hi Claire, I had a lot of comments from people saying the grey looked like a zombie, many people also didn’t really get the Hackney map thing either. So as a chance to make a change I removed both of these. Nothing in the logo was meant to offend anyone and colour choices were made purely on a design aesthetic while using a colour that was not too close to any particular skin tone. I appreciate the feedback and I’ll take it into consideration.

  8. Thank you, Emily. I have just added an event and it was so quick and easy to use! Excellent.! This site was recommended to me and I shall be quick to recommend it to others. It’s a great service for us living in Hackney wanting to know what is going on in our borough.

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