Certainly prefer this one, allows you to see the last few in one go directly.

One question; any plans to feature recently updated journals on the front page? I seem to recall that pushing them some more was part of the plans.

Quote:Original post by phantom
One question; any plans to feature recently updated journals on the front page? I seem to recall that pushing them some more was part of the plans.

Thanks for the reminder.

One of the more surprising suggestions I received was to have Recent Threads, Recent Journals and News share one widget container and work as tabs (the same way I have Jobs, Events and Spotlight up top).

So, yes, Recent Journals are coming to the front page. I'm just not sure what shape it'll take yet. Most likely is that I'll narrow column two, giving News more room, and then put Recent Threads and Recent Journals together in a tab box.

The new Features box is better [smile]

I'm curious about what happens when the News box grows - Will it just not grow? Will it be scrollable? Or will it just expand but leave the right hand side of the page blank?

Taking a look in the actual Features tab we have the moment, it seems to me that the GD Showcase thing has a lot of duality with the IOTD's - perhaps a merging of the two would be appropriate?

I have to admit that I am a sucker for clean, tightly-kerned sans-serif fonts. I want everything to look like The Designers Republic puked on a London Underground map.

Quote:Original post by dmatter
The new Features box is better [smile]

Some people like the old one better. :sigh:

Quote:I'm curious about what happens when the News box grows - Will it just not grow? Will it be scrollable? Or will it just expand but leave the right hand side of the page blank?

It will just expand, leaving the right hand side blank. Once you introduce columns, you lose the ability to constrain content to always be "balanced," especially for dynamic content applications like this. "The web is not print," or something equally pithy. [smile]

Quote:Taking a look in the actual Features tab we have the moment, it seems to me that the GD Showcase thing has a lot of duality with the IOTD's - perhaps a merging of the two would be appropriate?

Yes, that's a good idea.

Quote:Original post by Ravuya
I have to admit that I am a sucker for clean, tightly-kerned sans-serif fonts. I want everything to look like The Designers Republic puked on a London Underground map.

I haven't even done the typography work yet.

How would this page look on a widescreen monitor? I'm using one part of the time and find it annoying that so much horizontal space is unused by many sites (gamesindustry.biz for example). iGoogle on the other hand is very nice, but probably overkill for this?

Other than that I like the starkness of the mockup.

altho I did say I liked the big feature box in the first design, I can totally understand how people would like this one better because they can see all of them straight away rather than having to click through the scroller. Any thoughts on combining them?

I'm a bit dual about the previous feature box and this one. I second Gaiiden on trying to combine them. Maybe keeping the most recent entry large like in the previous entry and a few more smaller at the bottom or something. I feel the same way about the IOTD box. I like the way you can see three thumbs with the current site design.

Overall, I like the look.

The one, somewhat minor, concern I have is that not all Image of The Day submissions are going to look good in such wide panorama. For the ones that work, it looks great, for those that don't they're going to look like total crap.

I prefer this one because it conveys a lot more information. I can find what I need quicker. The front page of a website like this should display a summary of recent activity and the second mock-up does a much better job of displaying the actual information. Plus the first assumes that each feature will have a decent high resolution picture that is unique to the article and represents the content. I would much prefer a brief summary of the contents to a picture that is essentially meaningless with regard to the purpose of the article.

With the recent shift towards wide screen monitors it might be better to try to compress the information vertically rather than horizontally as has been done in the past. This ties into my biggest criticism of the first page is that while it looks good only about half the information is viewable on my monitor without scrolling. While that isn't a big deal, it would be particularly nifty if you could fit all the 'overview' features onto an average sized screen. This monitor is 1600x1200 which is probably a higher resolution than most people. Also on that note the fonts seem huge in your mock-up.

Also the information in news/forum posts isn't very well separated. Especially the forum posts. What might work well there is to have each item in a slightly lighter/darker colored box with rounded corners and no border, that way it isn't a definite separate section but an emphasis on the contained information being its own piece of that section.

Overall I really dig where you're going with this. I liked the solid borders on the first, especially the tab accents for the log in/sign up section.