Oldcastle APG portal planning
This is a planning page for the building of the Oldcastle APG portal project. Feel free to leave notes and edit.
Contents
Portal Plan
AboutUs is developing a portal in conjunction with the Oldcastle Architectural Products Group (APG) that will represent a fully-editable wiki of information relating to the companies and brands that constitute Oldcastle APG, and provides a reference for people inside APG as well as retail customers, architects, planners and more. This portal provides a model that allows for other portals for the Oldcastle divisions as well as the parent organization, CRH.
All pages will have a third-party voice, capitalizing on AboutUs' credibility as a source of information external to the company's and their various websites.
Portal Front page will include
- Contains a description of both Oldcastle APG as well as the purpose/mission of this portal
- Link to a "recent changes" page which lists all of the edits made to articles on AboutUs that are part of the Oldcastle APG portal.
- Links to 4 subpages (each with their own subpages):
- Company lists (breaks down into link to individual company pages, see notes below)
- Retail product organization charts, showing the various divisions in Oldcastle APG (Lawn and Garden, Building Products, etc) as they apply to retail products. This list then boils down to various company and brand/product pages
- Commercial product organization charts (similar to retail product chart, but oriented to commercial products)
- Specialty product organization charts (same as above)
- Logos of the various brands/products manufactured by OldcastleAPG companies.
- Logos will directly link to the individual article on that product/brand
- Logo chart will also have a direct link to a Product/Brand list (breaks down into link to individual product/brand pages, see notes below)
- A list of the various Oldcastle divisions and CRH divisions and how they (inter)relate, with links to individual Oldcastle/CRH division pages.
Individual company pages will include
- Badge connecting it to the rest of the portal
- Description of the company, along with relevant images
- Contact numbers (all that are applicable):
- Sales
- Customer Service
- Location contacts when there are multiple locations
- Location information (all that are applicable):
- HQ
- Customer Service
- Manufacturer location
- Retail location
- Other
- Products and Brands by this company:
- Products/Brands manufactured (with links to individual product/brand pages)
- Products/Brands distributed (with links to individual product/brand pages)
- Additional information
- Product suggestions
- Other features that the company's website might offer (videos, etc)
- History of the company, particularly in cases where they were bought up or changed names, branding and other info.
Individual product/brand pages will include
- Badge connecting it to the rest of the portal
- Description of the product/brands, along with relevant images
- Application for this product and whether it is for:
- Commercial applications
- Residential applications
- Both
- Oldcastle companies that:
- Manufacture this product/brand
- Distribute this product/brand
- Links to external companies that might provide a retail outlet for this product brand
- Distribution channel for this product/brand, whether it is:
- Commercial
- Retail
Individual Oldcastle divisions, Oldcastle and CRH pages
- We will build out good, descriptive pages on the various other divisions of Oldcastle, as well as the Oldcastle (over all) company page and CRH pages.
- Pages will have:
- Clear link to CRH
- Description
- Contact information
- Badge/navigation that interlinks it to:
- CRH
- Oldcastle
- Division information
Needs, actions
Things needed to complete the portal (strikeout as the have been done):
- AboutUs Content team:
- Work on the Oldcastle APG portal as outline above.
- Work on individual Oldcastle APG companies as outlined above.
- Work on individual Oldcastle APG products and brands as outlined above.
-
Write a Project Synopsis (ie. this page) -
Write up synopsis of that individual pages will include
- AboutUs Development team will support the efforts with:
- Fix to the Google Map extension:
- Allowing for multiple address information to be pulled from each page
-
Distance computation (if it's easy to do)not easy, ignore -
A way of setting the scale on the map -
Ability to input coordinates that center the map on those coordinates
- Skin for the portal, with two versions to begin with:
- Oldcastle
- Oldcastle APG (which will be a variation of the first)
- Claims
- Fix to the Google Map extension:
- Oldcastle APG will provide:
- List of all the companies
- Products/brands they manufacture
- Products/brands they distribute
- List of all APG products/brands
- Are they commercial or retail
- Is there an external company that provides retail (ie. Home Depot or Lowes)
- Applications for this product/brand
- List of locations for all the APG companies:
- HQ
- Customer service
- MFG location
- Retail location
- Other
- Contact information for company:
- Sales
- Customer service
- Various locations
- List of all the companies
Images
Images from the 1/28/07 Oldcastle APG portal strategic planning session between Ryan Posner of Oldcastle APG, and JohnStanton, TakKendrick and StevenWalling of AboutUs.org.
Rough idea of what the portal mainpage Oldcastle APG will look like
Plans for the structure of Company articles, Brand/Product articles and Oldcastle/CRH (non-APG) articles
List of tasks that AboutUs and OldcastleAPG (Ryan) will be working on/providing in the upcoming week or so to support the portal
List of tasks/technologies that our Development team will be building to support the portal
Discussion
- 08Feb08 - Tiffany and I right now have an ETA of completing our database by March 7th with a plan to send information weekly to AboutUs.org starting February 15th with completed company profiles. Any information that changes to information already sent to AboutUs.org will be communicated or directly edited within a wiki page if already amended. Let me know if this sounds like a good plan. -- Rposner (talk)
- Sounds good to me. Let's see what Steven W. says on Monday, but I think it's a good plan. -- TakKendrick | talk
21:50, 9 February 2008 (PST)
- March 7 is perfectly fine. I do have some basic work to do on articles that doesn't require the company profiles, but the sooner the better (of course). Steven | talk to me 10:50, 13 February 2008 (PST)
- Sounds good to me. Let's see what Steven W. says on Monday, but I think it's a good plan. -- TakKendrick | talk
- 07Feb08 - I put together a database to capture information requested by AboutUs.org and will be working with Tiffany Newman our communications lead on getting the information gathered and consolidated. I will work with Tiffany tomorrow and come up with an estimated time frame on when we will be completed with our information. -- Rposner (talk)
- Fabulous. While we've got quite a few things to do now, the database is gating making sure we've correctly identified everything we need to work on. Let us know the ETA once you have an idea, and we'll happily do work on the other areas we know about in between. -- TakKendrick | talk
- Fabulous. While we've got quite a few things to do now, the database is gating making sure we've correctly identified everything we need to work on. Let us know the ETA once you have an idea, and we'll happily do work on the other areas we know about in between. -- TakKendrick | talk
- When I go to the Oldcastle APG Companies page, I noticed that it does not work the same as the Oldcastle APG Portal page in sense that if you remove or add the Oldcastleapg badge to a site, the list on the Oldcastle APG Companies does not update. I found this out when I removed the Oldcastleapg badge from Eagle Cordell as I found out that Eagle Cordell was sold and is no longer part of Oldcastleapg. Can we have the Oldcastle APG Companies page and the future break out sites working how the list on the Oldcastle APG Portal page works with the purge cache update feature? -- Rposner (talk)
- It looks like you figured out how to add the PurgePage template (which I think is the solution you were looking for), but if you still have a question, let me know. -- TakKendrick | talk
- Correct, I did add the purgepage template and tried executing it, but Eagle Cordell is still listded on the Oldcastle APG Companies page. Let me know what you think. -- Rposner (talk)
- The EagleCordell.com page still had Category:Oldcastle Company on the page, which I just fixed. The primary problem here though was that the Oldcastle APG Companies page wasn't an intersected list, but a "WikiPages" list done by hand. I'm not sure if that's because Steven had a particular reason for this (my guess) or if he didn't think to use the intersect for the list. Regardless, I've taken EagleCordell off the list. -- TakKendrick | talk 21:50, 9 February 2008 (PST)
- The EagleCordell.com page still had Category:Oldcastle Company on the page, which I just fixed. The primary problem here though was that the Oldcastle APG Companies page wasn't an intersected list, but a "WikiPages" list done by hand. I'm not sure if that's because Steven had a particular reason for this (my guess) or if he didn't think to use the intersect for the list. Regardless, I've taken EagleCordell off the list. -- TakKendrick | talk
- Correct, I did add the purgepage template and tried executing it, but Eagle Cordell is still listded on the Oldcastle APG Companies page. Let me know what you think. -- Rposner (talk)
- It looks like you figured out how to add the PurgePage template (which I think is the solution you were looking for), but if you still have a question, let me know. -- TakKendrick | talk
- 18Mar08 - Rebuilding my new Mac tonight, I will pass some of the items we discussed tomorrow. -- Rposner (talk)
