COIN.ARMY.MIL version 2.0 is active
SWC Members,
After several months of hard work, we are ready to roll out version 2.0 of COIN.ARMY.MIL. The previous website was restricted behind the AKO firewall for security and public affairs reasons.
We now are maintaining three sites - a fully public informational site, and two restricted sites - one requiring DoD Common Access Card (CAC) authentication, and the legacy AKO site. The AKO site will likely eventually close once we can enable AKO sign-on to the CAC card site. For the meantime, we will keep all three open.
The public site is designed to provide basic information on our organization, upcoming events, and public activities. The restricted sites are designed for DoD members to find information collaborate on an unclassified level.
The purpose of the restricted sites is to act as a gateway to COIN products, information, and organizations we deem critical. It does not seek to replicate work already performed by other systems such as CALL, BCKS, or other organizations. Hopefully, it's a reference for a busy individual looking for the most relevant COIN info, and our seminar products.
To that end, we need a lot of help. We're a small team maintaining the site in-between meetings - so if you have a contribution or improvement, please email us via the contact information at http://coin.army.mil.
We have designed two competing pages to help provide access to the information. We have received positive and negative feedback on both, and wanted to pose the question to the community.
Front page #1 contains a functional breakdown of COIN information. It is based on the KM concept that you do not care what site it's on, you just want the info.
Front page #2 breaks it down by site - outlining the various sites we run.
Let us know which one is most useful in the poll above. We hope to continuously improve and add content as the site continues to evolve. Your comment and feedback is appreciated either here or via our sites.
Thanks,
Major Niel Smith
Operations Officer
USA and USMC Counterinsurgency Center, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas
Part of the Army’s Combined Arms Center
Just a couple of comments
Hi Neil,
First, since I don't have ako or CAC access, I can only comment on the public site. With that in mind, I have to say that it is bland, boring and does nothing to attract the eye at all. Public sites, and especially those designed to engender support for some agenda that is controversial, really need a lot of that elusive "Wow" factor. I hate to say it, but both are a major yawn - they appear to be circa 1995 presentation style.
Some specifics:
- The background colour is extremely poor and sets the tone. If I were you, I would shift it to either a green or a blue, both of which have more positive emotional connotations in Western cultures (grey engenders some distrust).
- Drop the pseudo-tiled marble background gif entirely - the sub-consciously communicated metaphor of "set in stone", which will be evoked in a number of public users, is definitely not the message you want to send.
- Where are the "Success stories"? Think public, public, public.... This site is "selling" a product to the public - COIN - which is intimately tied into public perceptions of the "Surge" (no one ever said the public was savvy ;)). You need success stories and you need public items related to both COIN and the Surge. "COIN in video", with links through to the Daily Show (etc.) would be a start.
- Your coding for
<!-- InstanceBeginEditable name="DirectorsCorner" --> doesn't work properly in Firefox - I think it may be the
<p align="left" class="templatelinks"> commands that are causing the problem, although it may be an interaction with the .css style. - Both front pages should be visible in a single screen. I'm using a 1280 x 800 screen resolution and I don't see the entire page. When I scroll down to get the non-visible information, I don't see any reason why I should have to - there's not enough link information to justify it in my mind.
Sorry to be so negative, but that is my honest opinion based on 14 years of web design, evaluation and analysis experience.
Marc
For what it's worth, I bleed
green, so I'm told -- but that CAC background is IMO, really, really bad. They got carried away with the ACU pattern. If they've got all their web sites with that, they really need to think about it...
I think I understand the intent but it doesn't go well on a web site.
I agree with most of Marc's comment but realize you're just getting started.
You may want to consider separating your links rather than by Organizations, Communities and Knowledges into those that are available to the public and those that are not, requiring AKO or CAC access. I realize that the site isn't there specifically to serve Joe Sixpack but if you're gonna let him in, it could be a little simpler for him to tell what he can get to and what he can't.
Good job, thanks for putting it up and thanks for the link.