Building the Meritocracy Now! website

#1

This is our biggest priority at the moment as far as I can see because we have no go-to place to send people to where they can find out more about Meritocratic Democracy, its vision, its principles and its aims. We need to grow and we need a site to share with our friends, family and colleagues that convinces them to join the Meritocracy Party and fight for Equal Opportunity for Every Child.

We have this forum, but it’s mostly for people who have already joined the Meritocracy Party and know about it, and while we have MeritocracyParty.org, a first-timer would have to read through a number of articles to get what we’re about – and as we know, everyone and everything is competing for people’s time/attention these days.

You can see the website under construction over here: http://162.243.87.123/

What we need is a landing page which is the first thing people see with the goal of getting them to subscribe to our newsletter. From there we’d introduce them to the forums and if they’ve told us where they’re from, have a nearby meritocrat who is willing contact them personally (for example if they’re in California and there’s a group there, someone from the group can get in touch).

We need to get this site up and running as soon as possible. I’m going to say by 5th July 2014, in two weeks time.

Work breakdown

  • Draft the visual layout (what the site will look like)
  • Create the necessary graphics (for example, banners)
  • Draft the content (what the site will say)
  • Draft an automatic newsletter reply for new subscribers (for example, telling them how to get started, where to find the forum…)
  • Translate the finished site into as many languages as possible
  • Create newsletter groups for each translation (for example a French Meritocrats group)
  • Add functionality that automatically detects a users location and shows them the appropriate translation
  • Add functionality that makes it easy to switch between languages
  • Add each translation to its own unique page (for example, fr.meritocracynow.net or meritocracynow.net/fr for French)
  • Make meritocracynow.net point to http://162.243.87.123/
  • Move the Discourse forum to a different URL (for example, to talk.meritocracynow.net)

After that we’ll need to test the site with people we know who have never heard about Meritocratic Democracy before and then start promoting it heavily once we know everything is working 100% as intended!

How can you get involved?

Start working on any of these items and post below with what you come up with! If you’re a graphic designer, you could post mock layouts. If you’re a writer, you could think about the best way to present Meritocracy to newcomers and draft something up. If you think you can do something else which would help the site, please post below as well!

Remember that the address for the site is currently: http://162.243.87.123/ (this will be changed to MeritocracyNow.net and the forum moved to, for example, talk.meritocracynow.net)

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#2

Worked on it a bit more, I’ve put our vision and principles on there.

#3

I will be looking into writing assignments shortly. I am an accomplished writer, in my own right and may have something to contribute.

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#4

Cool, just post anything you write which you think would be good to have up there. As you can see from the current draft the idea is to have something short, concise and compelling that gets across the point of what we’re about .The goal is for people to sign up to the Meritocracy newsletter and from there show them the different ways in which they can get more involved.

#5

I’m not sure how relevant this will be at this time in the websites construction, but I guess it covers content. There was an old meritocracy site I used to visit that contained what seemed like a decent manifesto, although it may need updating slightly. The site doesn’t seem to be active anymore but the manifesto page is still up. Perhaps we could use it/adjust it to our needs? It may be that someone here was responsible for that site? It’s also possible that it may be too in depth for what you had in mind but enough talk, here’s the link. See what you think.

http://gmpuk.ucoz.co.uk/index/policy/0-8

#6

Thanks for sharing. Honestly, I think it’s the opposite of what we want to go for. It’s way too in-depth as you said and has a number of unrealistic points. It’s the omnibus type of manifesto, a list of everything that you have to accept to agree with the party’s premise. Whereas what we need in my opinion is to highlight how Meritocratic Democracy is a new approach to politics that will empower people and societies.

I’m glad someone took the effort and time to write something that in-depth up, but I just don’t see it as viable for a global landing page. Or even for a platform unless it’s significantly stripped down because at the moment it’s someone’s conception of what an ideal Meritocracy would look like and it reads like they obsessed too much over the details and wrote what they think should be the laws of a Meritocratic Democracy - without providing their reasoning or considering that in reality, anything we come up with is going to be different at the moment of truth, which is why it’s essential to communicate the vision.

Especially on a global scale!

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#7

Did a bunch more work on it: http://162.243.87.123/

I’ve been really busy lately and I think we should go with a rolling release model. I.e., just get this out in English and then work on translations, multilanguage functionality, more newsletter stuff, etc while it’s live.

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#8

It’s looking good. Do you have a rough time scale before we can start promoting the site and sending people to it?

#9

I did but I haven’t had much time to work on it recently which is why we’re 2 weeks behind.

At the moment I’d like to see more pics on: http://meritocracynow.net/t/i-support-equal-opportunity-for-every-child/170/2?u=roberto and then create a slider from that to put on the page and launch it as is. We can then refine while it’s live and based on user behaviour when they visit the site.

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#10

I tidied it up a bit and I’ve now made it the default website for http://meritocracynow.net

The “activation” process is planned as follows:

  1. Someone comes across http://meritocracynow.net/ (on social media, through a referral, searching on Google, etc)
  2. If they’re partial to the message and want to get involved, they’ll subscribe to our newsletter.
  3. Our newsletter then points them toward this forum. A link to the forum is also on the main page.

Once on the forum, they receive a message from me inviting them to introduce themselves and to get more involved. From there, it’s up to them how they want to participate to make a change in the world.

We’ll need to refine this process over time of course, so please feel free to post suggestions regarding it. I’ll share the hard numbers as they come in, i.e. whether we see more visits, more user registrations, more participation …

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Domain Name Switch
#11

Also, special thanks to @amdeus for helping to set up the photo gallery!

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#12

http://www.meritocracyparty.org/ doesn’t seem to be working at all. Is it abandoned or is there some sor of maintenance going on?

#13

There’s a technical issue that we’re working to resolve, I apologise for the downtime. We’ll get it back up ASAP.

I only got back from the holidays a couple of days ago and couldn’t do anything from abroad to help sort it out, hence the long time it’s been down.

Once it’s fixed we’ll have better processes in place to avoid such a long downtime.

#14

Hopefully it can be fixed soon, I’ve been trying to access the site to copy the FAQ articles for translation but… No go, unfortunately. Perhaps there should be a facebook / twitter site as well that would at least index the central FAQ texts and maybe some articles?

#15

http://meritopedia.org/index.php/FAQ

#16

Cheers! I’ll try to start working on it ASAP as a piecemeal project and run the texts by Klockars before I return the completed results to you.

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#17

I advise you to include some videos at the bottom of your landing page and also include a link to the armageddonconspiracy.co.uk website, most people here are interested in Illumination as well as meritocracy, because Illumination is interesting it keeps people coming back to read. A simple landing page may be interesting but as soon as someone leaves that page they may just never come back, 2 minutes of reading probably won’t keep people interested, just look at most people who are in support of meritocracy, they are usually interested in Illumination also, Mike Hockney has done an amazing job in getting people interested in the movement, so direct them to the AC website. Include 3 videos at the bottom of the page, explaining meritocracy in an interesting way and under that include links to the AC website and meritocracyparty.org.

#18

Thanks but we don’t want to promote or be associated with any other websites that are not strictly about Meritocratic Democracy. Even then it’d be on a case-by-case basis.

The point of the landing page is not to get people to come back to it, but rather to peak their interest enough to subscribe to our newsletter and from there to join our forum eventually. It’s a ladder. Since putting up the landing page we’ve had a 40% increase in newsletter subscribers.

On that note, putting up links to other pages defeats the purpose as each link can distract the visitor from signing up to the newsletter which is what we want. The “forum” and “blog” links are there because regulars need a quick way to get to those sites.

There are definitely things to improve though such as the frequency of newsletters (we’ve only sent a few). Including a video that introduces Meritocratic Democracy as we understand it would be great once we have enough designers with the time, resources and skill to create something awesome.

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#19

Something along these lines?

Although perhaps a bit more condensed, to the point and with a little more ‘pizzaz’?

#20

You need narration for videos to get attention. Also, the documentary style of narration with pictures then mixed with clips of important people saying important things can qualify your message.