The Site, the front page, design and your opinions

[Dan]

Hi all,

Over the past few days I have been making some basic changes both to the forum (URL's etc) and to the front-end of the site and front page. Including tidying up the advertising and putting a better tagging and tag clouds in.

As such I was wondering what your opinions and thoughts were and whether you had any further improvement ideas and any ideas that would make the advertising more suitable for you and the design more fluid?

I was also looking for feedback as to the reasons that no-one submits news to the front page I am also interested to see how many of you actually use the site other than to use the forum. ( i know people do because, well my stats tell me a lot of people read the front page)

I want to use your feedback to better tailor the site for you all. If you don't use any other section of the site, would you mind letting me know why that is and what may entice you to other areas of the site?

Also I am after honest feedback, even if it is negative, or critical. So please don't tell me everything is fine if there is something you do not like.

Kind Regards
Dan

 

[eggson]

I mainly use the forum as news articles are posted as topics for conversation.  I've visited the other areas but i dont frequent them.  Why? 
Well ex player profiles  - there's only so many people becoming 'ex' so updates aren't too common.  Things like the ladder i see on other sites i go to (dont get me wrong, a ladder is good to have in every site!).  Tipping comp - i won one last year so this year i'm relaxing and enjoying footy without going for a specific non manly team 


Also, i'm not a fan of the karma system.  Another forum i went to had it and in the end it became a popularity contest.  In this forum it seems like it's used for people to show their disagreements or negative thoughts on someone's post rather than their attitudes maybe?  I don't know, i'm usually drunk when i post at nights so i can see my karma going to -50 in no time  :'(
I just like good healthy debate and opinion.  That's just my $0.02 ....

I never really use the tags here or anywhere, i haven't found the ads obtrusive at all, i quite like the design of the forums - strong colours and borders definately help.

Hope this helps mate, i really appreciate what you do.  I work in a huge IT company and i think it's a good thing that i can still enjoy sites regularly even though i'm surrounded by them all day and you'd think i'd never want to see them after work!

 

[Dan]

Yeah definitely worth while feedback TBH karma was always disabled in this forum until the last template auto enabled it.

I will probably remove it but most people here take things pretty light heartedly.

I agree about the news items being posted in the forums, it is my preference that they be posted on the front page and then a forum article without the full post linked to it. I may write a modification to the forum, so that if people want to post a news article the can but it posts it to the front page and the news article links to the forum discussion of the article and the forum post links to the full forum.

Would that change entice you to view the front page more?

Basically I want to gravitate away from the site being just forum centric I want the articles and news to start taking precedence.

I have also just finished writing a script that inserts all the round information for the footy tips to save me doing it every week.

Now I just need to write another script that will add the results of each game, which I will do next week. That should automate things a little.

But basically I am looking for ideas that will get you looking at other sections of the site.

Cheers
Dan

 

[Corso_Pete]

For unknown reasons I only ever use the forum, no good reason but it seems that all the relevant news articles are posted in the forum pages in any case.

If something is important it always in the forum pages so you you end up reading about it anyway. It is probably just laziness and for that I plead guilty as I ma sure plenty of work goes into the other aspects of the site.

I have no idea what the "karma"thingy is all about so it does not matter either way to me.

I should go and check out the other areas of the site..............one day soon, I promise!

 

[missing_something]

The main problem I see with the site is the main page, the layout it's not very readable - especially at lower resolutions, see comments on photo.

http://img295.imageshack.us/img295/9701/86865024wm7.jpg

hope that doesn't offend.


Get this error maybe One out of three times when clicking on the forum also

Not Acceptable
An appropriate representation of the requested resource /silvertails-forums/index.php could not be found on this server.

Apache/1.3.37 Server at www.silvertails.net Port 80

you might find theres an issue with mod_security

 

[Dan]

yeah i just got that, it is the php Session IDs

 

[Dan]

Cheers the 406 error SHOULD be gone, let me know if it pops up again.

I like the suggestions on the front page and I will get to work on those next week. Cheers mate.

I still think I will be fighting a losing battle as people seem to just gravitate directly to the forums

 

[The Gronk]

Yeah definitely worth while feedback TBH karma was always disabled in this forum until the last template auto enabled it.

It's just a good way for people to suck up to the webmaster, mr +11 

 

[Jethro]

Edited by Dan....kind of counter productive to what I am trying to achieve with advertising

 

[missing_something]

[quote author=missing_something link=topic=178235.msg194259#msg194259 date=1219407629]
editing the quote of the post above.

I'm not setting that address to resolve to my localhost file as it will cause me other issues when viewing client sites but I am aware it is possible to block the ads,

Cheers

 

[Jethro]

No worries M_S, I was only offering you an option on how to resolve one of the issues that you had previously pointed out to Dan because the interactive part was too low.

 

[Fluffy]

Go Manly

 

[ssar]

99% opf the time it is the forum only I use in this site.

I'd like to see those random green double-underlined words linked to ads dissapear, they are very annoying.