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Dakka has grown so much in the last 18 months, but one place that has not changed in a while is the actual home page. Yak and I have had some discussions about what we want to do with it, and while we have a lot of good ideas, I'm still thinking of the best way to implement them. As such, I thought it might be a good idea to just ask for opinions and ideas from everybody.

What sort of features do you think would be useful on the dakka home page?
We can pull in content from the articles, gallery and forum easily now, and inevitably will do so. We have a few other ideas that we'll keep under wraps for now, but what else would you like to see on a frequently updated home page?

What format do you think would be best for the dakka home page?
We are thinking of something that will be updated multiple times per day, so it needs to be clear what has updated. We need to have a fair amount of text content so search engines like the page better. We need the page to appeal to people viewing dakka for the very first time as well as our oldest, grumpiest users. Highly visual stuff is always good so we are keen to use lots of small pictures as well. What websites have you seen that look good? Do you prefer website content shown like they do at fark.com, joystiq.com, librarium online, linking straight to the forums like bolter and chainsword, large descriptions like digg.com, or some other format (please link to examples that you like too).

Technically we are free to do anything, but I want to keep stuff that will scale down to 800x600 resolution which will rule out a few ideas. Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

legoburner wrote:Do you prefer website content shown like they do at fark.com

Yeah, I like the Fark look with the headlines & tabs.

The one problem with a fark style interface is that there is no easy way to show thumbnails of gallery images without breaking the flow of the page. There is a minor issue in that it does not provide a high enough text to code ratio either (harming dakka's performance in search engines). I do like the rapid flow of information it presents though.

I'm afraid I never look at the front page, unless I'm on some other computer without my bookmarks installed and have to type in the URL manually. I always leap straight to the forums. It's the forums that are the most important and dynamic part of the site anyway, so I guess my vote is that the forum front page should be the front page of Dakka.