Home Page Redesign

Hello all,

I've got a couple of images to show you of what we're planning for our home page. First of all, the logged out visitor's Home Page:


(click for full size)

First of all you'll see that we're showing a "Trending" panel as the first listing of site content. The idea being that if someone comes to Boards who just wants to have a look around, they'll see something that piques their interest and click. This may feature options for "Today," Yesterday," "This Week" as you can see.

Below that you'll see the normal "Latest Posts" that we're familiar with and you can split that by Category.

We've also taken some space on the right to include a Login / Sign up widget as well as one for the Announcements

However, the "Logged In" page is probably the one you're mostly interested in seeing:


(click for full size)

The "Trending" panel from the logged out page has changed to include the existing functionality of "My Threads," "My Forums," and "Latest" as we already have. There's a tab labelled "My Boards" and honestly, we're not sure if that's something we'll put some work into - in theory it's covered between Forums and Threads, but it might include things like visitor and private messages - it hasn't been finalised, but we thought we'd leave it in the mock up to see how it looked.

Below that is "My Threads" which would mean that we could take it out of the tab listing in the first panel and maybe the page loads showing your forums on the top and your threads on the bottom. I'd love to see these as being user configurable, so you could ideally set those 2 panels up to show what you want (and maybe even only show one of the panels). That's not been discussed in any sort of detail as far as I know though, so maybe the lads will be cursing me for evening mentioning it

Finally, there's the Suggestions panel beneath the My Threads panel. This is pretty self explanatory, it'll offer you links to threads/forums elsewhere on the site that are similar to threads/forums you're already following or posting in regularly. How the algorithm to determine this will work I'm not sure.

Similarly the space on the right has the Announcement's Widget as above and if we think of some cool ideas to fill up the remainder of that space, we'll try them out.

So I'm happy to answer any questions you might have about this. We don't have a time-line in place for when this will happen, but it's likely to be sooner rather than later.