[Imc-uk-useability] startpage changes Dec 06

[WietsE]

mish wrote:
> Hello all
>
> Some thoughts on the startpage designs that wietse has put together
>
> FEATURES
> I think at least two features should be on the front page.  They move
> fast enough that having only one could mean a feature would disappear
> before most readers see it.  So maybe two features with some text (but
> less text than many current features have on the front page) and another
> 3-5 headlines of features.
>   

Yeah 2 features could work, although we should be aware that they don't 
become too dominant on the startpage, like they currently do.

> PROMOTED WIRE
> Having it up with features would be interesting to see how it looks -
> repeated as they would also be in the open newswire.  Not sure (either
> way)
>   

I thought that once promoted they would move to the promoted wire, 
instead of being on that and also stay on the open wire.

> UPCOMING EVENTS
> I would like to keep them up on the front page.  They should be brought
> in automatically from the new calendar, but a few items should appear
> there.
>
>   

It would be good if it could automatically come off the calender. 
Currently I think it doesn't really work. 'Upcoming coverage' implies 
that those are events on which reports and articles will follow. But it 
seems to be to get events advertised by people who have admin access and 
can be bothered to manually add it. It's definitely not complete.

> MOST COMMENTARY
> not sure about that.  At the least it would have to be most comments in
> the last week/2 days/whatever.  But we would end up with a lot of
> fash/anti-fa threads appearing there.  The primary purpose of indymedia
> (to me) is for news, not for commenting on/arguing about the news.  I
> don't know if I want to encourage/reward it.
>   

Not necessarily most comments, but articles that we can specifically 
'highlight' like a special report, very good article, nice video, etc. 
Again, it's breaking down the 'promoted stages' and thus making the 
startpage more dynamic. I quite liked this 3rd design I'd come up with 
where we can outline a specific article that stays on the startpage 
slightly longer and a photo next to it. It would be good if visually the 
page is nice to look at and not too serious (as in: all text). Also as 
there has been talk of but there still is no photo.indymedia.org, this 
could be a nice way of putting the spotlight on the invaluable photo 
work a lot of our contributors do.

> Some interesting thoughts on online discussion and the "social
> interface" are here
> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/NotJustUsability.html
>
> RECENT/POPULAR REGIONS/TOPICS
> "headers of region, topic and action pages, with titles of its current
> articles. The headers of pages with most recent articles would show."  
>
> I quite like this idea, though many posts would appear in multiple
> sections.
>
> Should we go for the sections with the most recent posts?  This would
> lead to posts definitely appearing multiple times.  It would also lead
> to the displayed sections changing a lot.  This is good for highlighting
> all the sections we have, but might be confusing as it would appear to
> be quite a random section.
>
> An alternative would be to show the sections with the most posts in the
> past week.  This would change less frequently, so would not be so
> confusing.  But many sections would never appear.
>   

Yeah, maybe it's an idea to try and stick certain. Anyways, it makes 
sense to show the most active regions/topics/action pages on the 
startpage. And yeah, try to avoid the showing of the same articles in 
similar sections. Surely there's a way around that one...

Cheers, Wietse


> Not sure which I prefer ...
>
> But either way it would be nice to have the lists of topics/regions etc
> display the number of recent posts in each section - say the number
> posted in the last week.  So for regions it might look like
>
> All Regions (112)
> Birmingham (5)
> Cambridge (3)
> Leeds/Bradford (6)
> Liverpool (5)
> London (37)
> Manchester (8)
> Nottinghamshire (1)
> ...
>
> ***
>
> And here is some discussion wietse and me have had off list - thought I
> should throw it in here
>
>   
>> And one little idea to add to the mix is to have a little section for
>> showing at least one feature from the global site, and maybe some of
>> that newswire.  That way we not only link into our own categories, but
>> also link into the wider indy network.  Come to think of it we could
>> extend that to import stuff from other imcs in the area.  Bristol,
>> Scotland and York spring to mind, and maybe even Ireland (though that
>> could be controversial ...)
>>     
>
> Some interesting stuff! We thought initially the regions and
> action/topic pages which have the most postings would show on the 
> startpage, rather then showing them all. But definitely it would be good
> to show a bigger regional and global network.
>
> mish
>
> On Sun, 2006-12-10 at 20:45 +0000, WietsE wrote:
>
>   
>> When I spoke to Mish we thought that maybe we could use this email list 
>> to work on startpage changes, so thats why I subscribed etc. Anyway, 
>> have a look at what I came up with and let's get thing rollin' !
>>
>> https://docs.indymedia.org/view/Local/ImcUkStartpageChanges
>>
>> Cheers, Wietse
>> _______________________________________________
>> Imc-uk-useability mailing list
>> Imc-uk-useability at lists.indymedia.org
>> http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/listinfo/imc-uk-useability
>>     
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Imc-uk-useability mailing list
>> Imc-uk-useability at lists.indymedia.org
>> http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/listinfo/imc-uk-useability
>>