Take a Look: Spring Cleaning
What’s all this, then?
If you haven’t noticed yet, we’ve got a brand-spankin’ new layout for the front page. As you may have ventured from the lack of posting activity, we’ve struggled keeping the front page maintained with news on a regular basis, and it was about time we revisited our system to make things interesting for the people that love MacThemes and have made it so great for all these years. Here’s our solution in detail.
I’ve been unhappy with the front page design for a very, very long time. It doesn’t best cater to MacThemes’ core traffic: longtime readers of the site who are on the forums every day already looking for new things. For them, the front page was utterly worthless; they had already seen the releases on the forums that day, meaning the only thing the front page was useful for was the insider content. But then you get to the other problem: We never work on insiders. Too much of our time was spent making minor news posts promoting the (lovely) work on the forums, and not enough providing interviews with the actual people making them.
Here’s the usual to-do list for making a news post:
- Go find something cool on the forums.
- Write up a paragraph or two about the thing.
- Fire up Photoshop and make a preview image.
- Format it, get it edited and approved to publish.
This method is stupid. When you’re getting started as a writer, it’s easy to write 5-10 news posts and suddenly exclaim how easy it is to keep it up, but after a while, you end up spending a couple hours a week making news posts when you could have been using that time researching for an insider or writing a review. It’s tedious and boring, and frankly, something most people aren’t willing to do when they’re going unpaid. It’s the reason it failed in MacThemes 1.0, and it’s the reason it’s failing now.
But after a little while of arguing and stagnation over what to do (and further killing our updates in the meantime, for which I personally apologize), here’s what we’ve come up with.
Previously, news posts and insiders had equal priority on the front page. Today, they’re now placed in the right areas: insiders, interviews, and other original stuff remains on the largest section of the site, while the minor links and features from the forums will now be placed in the sidebar, and removed of priority for formatting and editorial attention. This gives us more time to work on the stuff you guys care about reading, and the time we’re not spending doing that we can instead use finding great forum content to link in the sidebar.
Anyway. We’ll see how it goes; in the meantime, please pardon our mess as we fix the design’s various niggles, and leave a comment with your feedback on how to make the front page as awesome as possible.
March 20th, 2009 at 6:08 am
I like the new design, looks more professional.
March 20th, 2009 at 6:10 am
The sidebar links should be direct links to the forum posts. The little description sentence seems pointless, in my opinion, as it’s already been said. It’s a waste of time to wait for the description page to load. The sidebar content itself seems a little off-center, as well.
As a suggestion, a small preview of the release might be handy. Nothing fancy, just a box that’ll take nearly no time to make. Photoshop actions would work quite nicely.
March 20th, 2009 at 6:18 am
looks good austin
March 20th, 2009 at 8:17 am
As someone who doesn’t browse the forums and who lives and dies by his feed reader I actually liked the posts pointing me to the best of the best of the forum content. I would suggest that this become a regular weekly post that all of the site contributors can contribute to by each choosing one or two unique items each week as their personal picks. They don’t have to be super detailed or anything like that. Just simple blurbs from each contributor linking to an item with a simple explanation of what the item is and why they like it.
It would be a nice way to keep people like me who don’t have time to dig through the endless (and in serious need of an overhaul in its own rights) forums up to date on all the neat little GUI goodies that get released there.
March 20th, 2009 at 8:19 am
Oh wait nevermind. This is why people like me should check out th new features before commenting on the old features
The Staff Picks Feed should do the job.
March 20th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Steven — Unfortunately, getting rid of the description page you mentioned is one of the things I’m working on fixing. Oh, WordPress, you son of a gun…
March 20th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Whats with the whopping great big font? Not a fan of the execution but the idea is solid and workable.
March 20th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
I love the new layout, but please move the recent forum posts back to the top of the sidebar!
March 20th, 2009 at 10:40 pm
I love the new layout. I can’t wait for it to be publish. Keep up the goo work, and I wish you can update the site about every 30 minutes, or one hour, or daily. I just like to see what’s new without going into the forum. Keep up the good work.
March 20th, 2009 at 10:56 pm
The large font doesn’t work well with the rest of the design. And the “MT News” header doesn’t extend to the edge of the rest of the page. (Just scroll to the top of this post to see what I mean. In terms of content, seems like a great idea.
March 20th, 2009 at 11:53 pm
Looks nice. The old styles loaded when I first got here so the formatting was all wrong, but after a refresh it’s all good.
March 20th, 2009 at 11:54 pm
Spoke too soon, now the page is back to the old layout…
March 21st, 2009 at 4:45 pm
My 2 cents: Migrate from wordpress to Drupal. It can hold the blog and the forum. Then you can use a voting module to let people vote on forum posts and have them automatically promoted to the blog if they are popular.
March 21st, 2009 at 9:05 pm
The staff picks sidebar is a little clumsy… you have to click on the title of the post, then you can click on the link.
I suggest you make the Staff Picks sidebar a twitter feed. You can plunk in the twitter widget code so you’ll have your links, and people could follow the staff picks on twitter.
March 23rd, 2009 at 1:51 am
14px size text on the homepage posts looks terrible. Not too keen on the over-sized H2 tag either.
I do like the idea behind the new “Staff Picks” on the right side of the page, though the text doesn’t align with the post titles. And “br” tags instead of just using an “li”? That’s just sloppy coding. Also, what’s the point of linking to a “link.macthemes2.net” page when the Staff Picks already states the entire content?
lol, that was a lot of complaining.
It looks good, but could benefit from some adjustments.
February 8th, 2010 at 7:54 pm
12px size for text is best.