DrZoidbergThis is what I thought when NS, and the rest of the internet, switched to making things look like they just splattered them all over the page. Flickr did it, google images did it and you guys did it. Personally, I like things in order and stuff like that. My brother says I'm weird for cutting my food into perfect fractions...
I like this new page. They scrolly thing with the news reminds me of the old school homepage. The top content thing is there but not splattered all over anymore. I got used to the old one, but I still prefer things to be in their place instead of differently sized and thrown all over the place. It looks better.
It was all the fad for a while on the internet. When Pinterest blew up, everyone thought that they had re-written the rules of web design using a fixed width column layout, yet ignoring the height alignment. It was every web designers dream, because having everything in a grid that doesn't line up in the backend is a crazy PITA.
The problem is that its VERY heavily reliant on thumbnails. The eye doesn't catch text, only thumbnails - and with the type of content that flows on NS, the thumbnails don't do most of it justice.
I'm relatively confident that even though a lot of people don't realize it, what they crave out of newschoolers is to read text in a list.
maximiliaanand why are the discussions and contests different than video and photos?
There is no accurate thumbnail for those, so they display slightly differently. We can play with this for contests, but forums absolutely do not have a guaranteed thumbnail.
On another note, is this the first time you've noticed the contest module? I find it stands out a lot more, even though its been there for 4 months.
413CrewI don't like it all, its a supper confusing layout, i love the home page we have now. The way i see it is if it aint broke don't fix it, keep it simple.
It is broke. The current homepage has not been doing a very good job at getting people to click on content.
dun.Canwhen the current (or old one i guess) home page first came out i hated it but now i love it, the same thing will happen with this one. One thing i like right away is how you have a lot of random's (the common NSer) content on the thumbnail screen at the top.
my one suggestion is to have is to have a little button in the corner of the videos on the homepage to add it to your playlist without having to click on the video and load a new page. so if you don't have time to watch the video at that moment you know where to find it later.
another thing not really related to the new home page but i think would be cool is if you got a message every time you add a video to your playlist as a reminder or notification.
Playlist idea is solid. Noted.
Also the entire homepage is still made up of the common NSer's content. Everything is open for everyone to partake in. The Splash page is Photo Of The Day, and the slider is made up of News of the Day and Photo of the Day - all of it chosen with our algorithm that is calculated by your upvotes.
ANYONE can make the slider with their content if its good enough.
-WZ-personally, on the old homepage i would usually scroll through to find new videos this week, and just go into the forums if i wanted to read threads. im not a huge fan of how much more scrolling i have to do now to find videos, but i do think the new layout looks better than the last.
This will require a deeper scroll depth than what you're used to. However, you will note that links you've already clicked on turn blue. So you'll look down the list for black links, which will help you track what you have/haven't seen.
In terms of going to forums for threads, that is kind of what we're going for. The homepage is for highlights, going deep into any section and you should try the subsection in the top level nav.
If you're an avid video fan, you should try the top rated videos page - its what an enormous amount of the video fans on the site use. Very few of them use the homepage.
swordsandpensReally? I honestly would have assumed that was a pretty heavily used feature, I know I used it pretty often and was wondering where it went
We spent an enormous amount of time building it into the homepage. As a matter of fact, it was supposed to be a core piece of what made the current homepage so amazing. It seemed to have a few people that used it heavily, but the masses simply never got onto it.
Its not lost, but the people that really like it I would love for them to try using the sub pages for each section for a bit and see how that works.