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Home Forums Other Design Dilemma! Which one is better?

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  • #36746

    I have a blog but now I want to make a community of active participants. Therefor I installed a new forum that is slowly picking up. To promote it, I have come up with new design for the homepage which lists some recent forum discussions.

    I would like to know what changes can I do in below design to promote this upcoming forum? I would like your opinion whether this design looks nice or should I shuffle the bottom part to top part which is currently focusing on blog posts?

    #97117

    Any comment guys?

    #97119
    chrisburton
    Participant

    A few things that come to mind right away are the following:

    – I think the multi-color border/banner at the top takes away from the logo.

    – The 2 menus seem odd to me underneath each other and the separators are unnecessary.

    – The border under the “More Products” button and the other around “Recent Forum Posts” are separating the content twice. That also seems unnecessary.

    – If you work on the typography of the headings and the body copy, it will make a huge difference. Try Typekit or if you have a larger budget, I can offer better alternatives.

    #97134
    chrisjg
    Member

    Ditto to the top border/banner.
    Ditto to the 2 menus – it looks wrong
    Ditto to the unnecessary border bar under the “More Products” button.

    Additionally

    I would move the 6 large product/tips icons and put them down the left hand side – you could make slide-outs from them on mouse actions (hover, click, etc) to give more info before the click-through.

    Moving them would allow the forum/subscription/articles to move up your page. I would also replace the subscription section with your ‘latest tips’ section.

    This is because you have 3 places to ‘connect with us’ on the same page – the central subscribe area, one in the header and one in the footer – keep them together, and not in the way of the site content (which is why people come to the site). Again you could have all that ‘connect with us’ information ‘grow’ out of the header via a button, mouse action, etc. (be careful not to overuse the same trick though) – have a look at how http://sharethis.com/ do their stuff.

    Get the site to focus visitors on the content (or whatever ‘call to action’ you are currently promoting), use google fonts to spice up the typography – as google seems to be your sites’ focus – or any of the other typography sites around.

    Good content + involved community = more visitors = more ‘likes and shares’ [and so on]

    Well, you did ask!

    Chris.

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