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I've already thrown this around the mod forum, but thought I'd see what the rest of dakka thinks before I commit myself to actually working on it. I've been working on a new dakka home page that hopefully shows a lot more of the content available over the rest of dakka. This is JUST A TEMPLATE - nothing works, no links work properly and there are loads of glitches.
Check it out at:
http://www.dakkadakka.com/core/index-template.jsp

The big chunk of text at the bottom is non-negotiable. The page has to scale down to 800 pixels wide. Lots of interface bits will be cleaned up and made neater.

Anyhoo, take a look, let me know what you think is missing or what could change or be added. The goals of the page are:
- Give a good overview of what is new across dakka
- Give a way to get to every major section of dakka
- Promote as much interesting content as possible (including RSS feeds from TGN and BoLS)
- Highlight any specific promotions (painting contests, etc) that dakka is running at that time
- Try and draw people in to the rest of the site
- Be friendly to search engines (mainly through that big chunk of text)

I don't like it. It's way too crowded. I don't know what to look at, because there's so much stuff in one place.

Eew.

Way too busy.

Alas I have this issue:



Any photoshop mockups or ideas would be greatly appreciated.

To be honest, i like it, its compact, sums up everything i needed to know before spending years on the turbo-voter.

It maybe too small for the lurker/casual but for me know visits here atleast twice a day, i like, especially the rumour setion.

Can you set this as a default homepage DCM's or something like that?

I'll try to be bit more precise. On your mock-up page, the first thin I notice is the Dakka painting challenge banner. Which is a good thing. BUT, it only takes up 1/3 of the horizonzal space and my attention quickly wanders of to the shiney things left and right before I finished reading the Challenge details.

I like it

Ive have to support anung.

Too much going on. For your nice comic: yes, engineered user-interfaces do hurt the users.

I would stay away from a big resolution and many windows, because you screw people like me who follow dakka on their mobile phone
when not at home. Not really funny to scroll a lot and hit those tiny buttons on a touch-screen.

Actual style seem to be similar to common software (and i'm aware this proves not to be user-friendly if other programs work this way),
I think its easier to navigate as it is now.

The current homepage is just as busy as the new one , if not more. The only difference i think is , people just filter out and ignore the wall of texts.

So if anything, people seem to notice the new one more because they cant mentally filter out the pictures as easily.

I like this one.

sA

<---2 Thumbs up... clever right?

I think this new one is even more confusing than the current one. Anyone who's never heard of this place might get lost looking at it.

A front page should be simple. Making it more complex isn't tha answer.

You could make space by getting rid of the "top users" sections and "popular forum posts".

Knowing that WaaaghGonads needs to find time to practice his hobby rather than writing about it doesn't seem like something that needs to be featured.

take care

I don't like the new front page, for the reasons already stated, but then I never look at the front page anyway.
There's a long-running joke at another forum I go to that nobody knows that the front page actually exists, so many people just head straight to the forums.

It's true.
Hell, "Recent Posts" is the starting page of my Internet Browser

I think HBMC has it. Keep the front simple so people can find what they want, then split those three dozen aspects of this front page into their own sections. The front should probably only contain an introduction, navigation, and possibly news.

H.B.M.C. wrote:I think this new one is even more confusing than the current one. Anyone who's never heard of this place might get lost looking at it.

A front page should be simple. Making it more complex isn't tha answer.

Yahoo vs google. That design is going the wrong way.

I am confused by the everything. It makes me easy prey for the terrible Forum Trolls, as I randomly try to click my way out of the jungle of text.

yea, its a bit to busy for my taste
but then again, my bookmark takes me straight to the forum section, so today was possibly the first time i've actually seen the homepage.

Login needs to be higher on the page. Right under sponsors. People need to be able to login to be able to participate. It at LEAST needs to be up enough on the page to be reachable without scrolling at all.

To go further, with home-pages 'more is less' applies more than ever. Scaring new visitors off because they won't know where to click won't help anyone.

I remember the old old Dakka spash screen - it was a quartered picture with some shots of 40K games, and then four options in the corners. That was a good home page. You saw what you needed to see, got the information you wanted right off the bat, and anyone new to the site could easily get an idea of where they wanted to go right from the start.

With your proposed homepage Lego, someone would have to know where they are going before they looked at it.

Walls of text are bad. Multiple frames with random pictures are bad. Menues with different formatting are bad. Buttons up the top down the side... no. It just looks bad and is difficult to use, especially for new people. Yes once you've used it enough you could get used to it, but no one should ever have to learn how to use a home page. It should be obvious.

Compare this to this and tell me what the obvious differences are besides subject matter?

HR.com is easy to navigate, the buttons are self explanatory, and it's interactive and fun. At S7 you need to have a good idea what you're looking for before stepping in, it's full of supurfluous information (on wider monitors they have 'random' gallery pictures which take forever to load) - and they attempt to summarise bigger sections on the front page. The menus themselves are difficult to navigate, and, again, you have to have a good idea on what you're doing before you get there.

And even with broadband everywhere, loading times are an issue. HR.com is a small flash page that loads on most machines in a few seconds. Depending on how much of S7's homepage you can see it can take a few seconds to 30sec to a minute to load.

And speaking of 'screen size', the HR.com site wins by having a very compact menu that fits within a single screen. S7.com's requires scrolling, sometimes from left to right, and that's awful for a home page.

The home page of a website is the website owner's attempt to grab your attention, not repulse the viewer. The simpler and prettier it is, the better.

I agree with HBMC. Less is more.

I think it's far too busy, and dividing the main chunk of the page into three equal sized columns is very aesthetically displeasing. I think the current page is better (although there is certainly room for improvement).

I think the biggest problem with the layout is that there is no focal point. What do you want the main focal point to be, and what do you want the user's eyes drawn to as soon as they open the site? The forum buttons, the news, the gallery, etc.?

As far as things you could look to losing, let's start with the right hand pane:

Poll - handy enough to have, no reason why it couldnt stay.

Gallery Featured Image - this is a nice touch, I like this one.

Recent Image comments - pretty much a rotating list of generic one liners, that are 9 times out of 10, completely unnecessary for the casual observer to ever read, let alone needing to see on the front page. You allready have a link to the gallery with the featured image, so dont really need another. At any rate, the picture changing every few seconds keeps drawing your attention away to it, and is one of the biggest contributors to the "busy" feel.

Global News Feed - great, informative, helpful, quick, necessary.

Top Users this week/Top Users this month - Some peoples milage may vary on this, but in my opinion, losing it owuld give you more room to play with, and would remove a source of encouragement for some people posting utter drivel just to boost their post count. Who really gains by knowing whos posted the most this week?

Friends of Dakka - again, good to keep. Shorten the description for Games Workshop though, and then you have a heap of room to cut that entire pane in, giving your central, and most important area a lot more space.


Now for the Left Pane:

I actually like the entire left pane and think its all necessary and/or helpful. One thing I would do however, is limit the characters displayed, so that you can cut that right back to the left hand side too, giving you plenty of central room to work with.

whether you decide to add more things to the right, or move some from the left to the right or what ever, you would have room to play with

I'd say lose all of the left frames and the right frames. Expand the center frame so that it extends from left to right. Add a bit of descriptive text between the buttons on top and the "news of the month" frame stating what the website's mission is, and you'll have a good start. Also, the site's logo should be bigger.

It's as ugly as hell.

Anything more than 1-line has been interesting to read so far, thanks.

Just wanted to add that you should also try clicking 'switch theme' in the navigation in the top right of the test home page as that will give quite a different level of spacing/depth. This homepage was modelled on google's igoogle page.

When I click "switch theme" it changes the color scheme, but the spacing and depth only changes very slightly. I'm running on Firefox though, I'm not sure if that would affect it?

I still think the biggest thing it lacks is a focal point. I see what you mean now, that it's been modeled after iGoogle, but I think one of the main reasons that iGoogle works is that you can customize the page yourself - iGoogle could just as easily become cluttered, but people are cluttering it themselves so it's a bit different I think. There's still something about the Dakka page that just makes it seem too busy though. I think there needs to be a bit of negative space to counteract all the business (one thing that iGoogle has a bit of, and the Dakka page is lacking).

I really think if you identified a focal point and focused on it, and made everything else a bit smaller, that would help a lot. Maybe you could randomize this each time someone loads the page? One time it's the news, the next time it's a gallery feature, etc.?

Also, I hope it doesn't sound like I'm ripping on you, Legoburner. I know you want the front page to kick ass (and I do too), and as it's the first thing new users are likely to see when they visit Dakka, designing a new front page is a pretty important undertaking. If I come across as overly critical, I apologize. I'm trying to be helpful.

It's all helpful thanks. The only reason I've not commented on the things in the thread is that my mind changes rapidly so I might not think the same thing 5 minutes later. The homepage has to simultaneously:
Give a good first impression to new users and feed them in to the rest of the site.
Give existing users a place to go for an overview, showing stuff that is updated, changing and being added.
Have large amounts of text to encourage high search engine ranking.
Have other search engine friendly features and layout to get more traffic fed through from google.

The challenge is getting the balance, and I'm well aware that the majority of users here will not be considering the last 2 options, so it is just a case of balance. Everything is still on the drawing board so I'll let this thread run a bit more then play around with some new ideas.