In this screencast we dig into adding some more modules to the homepage of the site. Fairly important stuff! At the moment, we only have a handful of them over there. We have a few hot links, a couple of ads, and a poll. Below that, a bunch of gray space. Not that space is bad, but in this case we have some important stuff to add anyway so we might as well use the room to do it.
One example of something we need to add is a subscription module. There is nowhere in the current design to subscribe via RSS. Whatever people say about RSS, I think it’s still a very important thing to expose for a content heavy site like this. I know I look for that link on sites all the time.
Another example is a module for The Lodge. At the time of this screencast it was a working title but clearly that has become the real deal! We talk first here about exposing a login form directly in the module.
We start building these things in Photoshop (as we do). We start by adding a “Recent Video” module below the hot links. This will be a good way to feature new videos (as I don’t do directly blog posts about new ones).
We end up doing a lot of “thinking” while looking at Photoshop, which is why I really love this stage of the design process. I don’t think we would have done as much good thinking if we were looking at HTML/CSS. At least, I wouldn’t.