Forum Posts featured on front page

[elephantspike]

I just had a stroke of genius- I can post forum posts to the main site the same way as I post content to the main site from everywhere else- by using the forum's RSS feeds in the WPMUDev Autoblog plugin. The WPUnite plugin only allows us to do this in reverse- post a blog post to the forum.

I have the Monty thread and the December events thread posted to the magazine excerpts and the slider now. Any worthwhile forum post with a decent image in it would be a good one to put on the front page. (Maybe we should let people know that if they want a post to be considered for inclusion on the front page then they should include an image in it).

It would be best if, as Admins, If we create a post we want to be on the blog that we post it to the blog first, though, and just check the cross-post to forum box instead, as we need to have some actual blog articles of our own on there. Just paste in the text, give it a title, use the media button to upload images, check the cross-post box and click publish. It really isn't any more difficult than posting on the forum; just less familiar. Also it let's you see what your post looks like including images right inside the compose message pane if you click the "visual" tab instead of the "text" tab.

Just play with it. Just paste some text in there the first time and click "publish" and look at it. You'll see the edit button right there on the published page so you can adjust it and learn the more advanced features gradually but the basic posting is very simple. Just try it. If you mess something up you will not make anything explode. Trust me.

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[Surfcrest]

I think it may take time to develop a team of bloggers and to stream this material in to make it work / fit perfectly, but that will come in time.
Until then we do need other ways of getting it mapped over, without duplicating too much.
It's nice that the front page is different, with respect too content than the back
But it's also good to stimulate front page comment and discussion in the back, where possible.
While we have a lot of Registered visitors / day, our post numbers are weak and I worry people may get bored and leave.
I'm hoping to have the "Take Care" message ready tonight sometime, as soon as I hear back from Dale.
I too sent Rush a note to let him know we could use a snippet to replace my "sawatdee kap" message.

Now that we have a stable front page, lets talks about the format of the article presentation.
I'd like to try different views to draw people's attention.

[elephantspike]

The thing about autoblog is that the excerpts link right to the original source- so if it's syndicated content from other blogs that's a trade-off for us because we get the content to feature but we have a lot of off-site links on the front page. When we use AUtoblog to syndicate content from our own forum it's win-win because it links right to the original forum post. It is technically duplicated as a blog post but no one sees that- the links all go right to the forum post.

Jellybean's bar review would be good for inclusion on the front page if it only had some pics. Maybe we should find some? Or even try to get some sort of paid banner ads to those venues he mentions?

WHat do you have in mind for format for article presentation? You mean the way the excerpts look n the main page?

[Surfcrest]

The major criticism was the main content area was too wide (if viewing full screen on a computer), making the text hard to read (the eye has a long way to jump left and right) and too may different things without anything specifically drawing the eye. Also, the flexible column width approach doesn't work too well. If you resize the browser window width the navigation"dots" under the main slideshow all go wrong and seem to display multiple times (on Chrome). [Aside - the navigation dots would be more useful if they had a tooltip giving the subject of the item - might be easier said than done depending on how it has been implemented]

Personally I prefer to stay with fixed column widths, with collapsible borders; I know in some circumstances scale-able content is maybe better for mobile devices, but, unless the columns are excessively wide, most mobiles will display them reasonably well. We often then find some extra graphic content/background to fill the margins - e.g. see http://www.phuket-pride.org/

But, the main design criticism of the home page is it's too cluttered and nothing draws the eye. Sometimes less is more..... Whilst the headings are all low key and the colours relaxing, its hard to know what the focal point is. Bolder headings would work better in our opinion, along with a cleaner design. Also, the current design, now with two side bars, makes the central column/content more readable as it's narrower, exacerbates the cluttered aspect leaving one thinking "where do I start?" One approach would be to put some of the sidebar items like recent posts into another slideshow, so they take up less space.

Regarding SEO we use a free plugin from yoast that works very well and gives lots of options for setting and evaluating the potential performance of every individual item. http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/ Needs a little bit of understanding and setting up but the results are worthwhile.

Hope the above is useful - it's intended to be helpful rather than critical! I continue to wish you well with the project and will give you more feedback when I have time.

These are some of the design areas Pete and I have been chatting about and so there are some ideas that can take what we are doing already and just re-focusing it a little more.

Please let me know what you think!

[elephantspike]

The solution to the cluttered-ness would be to go back to 2 columns and make the overall width narrower- which is what I think Pete is suggesting- but that means more bamboo (or whatever we put for a page background) around the edges- and the wider screen you are viewing it on- the more background you will see- and this setting will apply to the forum as well as the main site.

[elephantspike]

I'm sure I can make the forum full width and the main page a little narrower come to think of it but I have to create a new page template within our Suffusion WP style. I haven't done that yet but I have a pretty good idea how to go about it.

Of course we don't really need to have ALL those widgets there- they are all pulling the same content and are just set to sort and display it differently. I just narrowed the main column by adding a third column and then I had to fill that column with something- so, yeah, Pete is right- it looks kinda cluttered now.

[Surfcrest]

What do you think of his yoast plug in?
We may need to prioritize the front page based on popularity.
I like the idea in principal, but I would think WP or phpbb captures similar stats?

[elephantspike]

I've heard of yoast. It's a pretty popular WP plugin. I'll have a look at it this week. The only thing WP does out-of-the-box for SEO is pretty permalinks which gives you the names of the articles in the URLs and phpBB only does that with the phpBBSEO Mod which we are using. We have WP stats plugins and can check stats directly on the server via cPanel but I think Yoast does a lot more than that.

... I just took a look at the plugin site and it looks like Yoast does for WP a lot of the same things that the phpBB SEO MODs do for phpBB.- some of those things we already have on our WP via the Suffusion theme we are using- like adding your own meta tags.