New Speedsolving.com Homepage

We've been working on a new homepage for Speedsolving.com with a few things in mind:
- Allow a place to share news easier. At the moment it's scattered throughout the forum.
- Allow anyone in the community to contribute stories and articles that others find interesting.
- Allow people to share photos of competitions - at the moment no central place for this exists.
- Allow people to share videos easier. Posting in the forum is great for discussion, but isn't ideal for sharing across the web. And there are a lot of great cubing-related videos not shared on the forum. At the moment the video gallery on the forum is the place to checkout some of the latest videos and discuss them, but I think creating pages like this one is a better viewing experience (especially for people who are new to the site).
- Have competition news/updates. Like ESPN where they talk about news/stats in major sports, I think it would be cool to do the same for cubing. Have competition reports, predictions, and general thoughts on the community. The long term goal would be to allow anyone in the community to contribute.
- Build a hub to get more people interested. While our community is always growing, there isn't a central hub that welcomes new people to the community and introduces them. They rely on the forum for this. I've created a page called "Start Here" which provides links to places for people completely new to start and gets them excited to join us. Everyone was a newbie at once, let's welcome people to join us and at competitions around the world.
- The current forum home is running out of data software, and doesn't work on mobile. It is super limited in it's options, so this new home will fix this.
- Note: You can now comment on news and posts on the new home page. If comments end up getting popular enough, I will link them to the forum so they show in threads too.

You can see the new homepage and what has been setup so far here:
https://www.speedsolving.com (link updated)

I'd like to ask you guys, the community, the following questions. Please reply below with your feedback, any and all is welcome, and the more replies the better. I'm hoping to launch this within the next week.

1. What are you thoughts on the new homepage vs. the existing one?
2. On the new homepage, what would you like to see that is currently not there?
3. Do you currently use "What's New" in the navbar at the top of the forum to find new posts? If not, why not?
4. Any other feedback about this idea. Open to all criticism.

Thanks for your time, and support.

pjk said:

1. What are you thoughts on the new homepage vs. the existing one?
2. On the new homepage, what would you like to see that is currently not there?
3. Do you currently use "What's New" in the navbar at the top of the forum to find new posts? If not, why not?
4. Any other feedback about this idea. Open to all criticism.

Click to expand...

1. The new homepage looks a lot cooler, but the existing one seems a bit cleaner and easier to understand at a glance.
2. I would really like the most recently posted threads to be on the homepage, as I think most people come to speedsolving.com for the forum aspect.
3. I never used the "What's New" tab because I never noticed it there, and because I never minded the layout of the homepage for finding new posts.
4. I think it would be a lot better if immediately below the world record/news/picture slide thing, there were the latest posted on threads. That is the main reason I come to SpeedSolving, so I would hate to see that leave the homepage. The same amount of threads as on the current homepage would be good, and below that all of the extra stuff could be added.

Good job overall though; it looks pretty awesome.

1. I adore the idea of this new homepage and the direction you would like to take Speedsolving. Comparing the new homepage to our current one, the new homepage makes clear that Speedsolving.com is a cubing news site with a forum, and our current one makes clear that Speedsolving.com is a forum with cubing news.
2. You know one thing I'd like to see on the homepage--we're working on that, I swear.
3. I've used What's New since I was first made aware of it about a year ago.

pjk said:

1. What are you thoughts on the new homepage vs. the existing one?
2. On the new homepage, what would you like to see that is currently not there?
3. Do you currently use "What's New" in the navbar at the top of the forum to find new posts? If not, why not?
4. Any other feedback about this idea. Open to all criticism.

Click to expand...

1. The new one is more modern, but you don't get to see new threads (eg. What cube should I buy). Maybe add the What's new button in.
2. What's new.
3. Always used What's new to find new replies
4. Not sure what to do about it, but the same pictures crop up about 4 times and it's really annoying me.

1. It feels more like a news outlet homepage, but it looks way better.
2. Maybe it's not showing up, but I'd like a "Recent Threads" box like in the [current] homepage we have.
3. Nope. It was basically the same thing as the "Recent Threads" box, except with one more button to click.
4.
-Bootstrap (or some other UI framework) please?
-Logo at the top of the page could use a change...
-Perhaps some other fonts.
-That navbar bugs me for some reason...

EDIT: Oh yeah, the scrolling is a bit iffy.

DGCubes said:

1. The new homepage looks a lot cooler, but the existing one seems a bit cleaner and easier to understand at a glance.
2. I would really like the most recently posted threads to be on the homepage, as I think most people come to speedsolving.com for the forum aspect.
3. I never used the "What's New" tab because I never noticed it there, and because I never minded the layout of the homepage for finding new posts.
4. I think it would be a lot better if immediately below the world record/news/picture slide thing, there were the latest posted on threads. That is the main reason I come to SpeedSolving, so I would hate to see that leave the homepage. The same amount of threads as on the current homepage would be good, and below that all of the extra stuff could be added.

Good job overall though; it looks pretty awesome.

Click to expand...

Me too.

molarmanful said:

-Logo at the top of the page could use a change...

Click to expand...

Yeah, the logo doesn't quite fit. Try making it flat or something

I really like the layout of the new home page. Loads of info easily accessible. Great job !!

I always use "new posts" and have done since joining - that is what I have bookmarked, and I rarely visit the home page.

The new page looks great, much more like a news site than a forum. I think you have to consider who your main target audience is though. Occasional or new visitors who want to browse and would appreciate a news-like format, or frequent readers/posters who visit every 1-2 days to check the forums? The latter (like me) might spend very little time on the home page unless it also serves the purpose of "what's new". It's certainly a nicer, more integrated way to present the news, but if it didn't also tell me which threads had new posts since I last visited, I would leave my bookmark pointing at "new posts".

I love the new one compared to the old one. I actually never visit the current home page, as I find it like a typical forum home page which is hopeless for navigating around the subforums. I always go directly to the forum. The new version reminds me more of a sports homepage, like nrl.com, or something like that. I reckon I'll actually use it if it gets implemented like that.

I like this new one, but it's a little bit too dependent on news. It's also a little bit paralysing to someone who knows nothing about cubing, which is a large audience for this site.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm considering moving the current homepage to another folder so it's still accessible while we launch the new homepage. Like many have mentioned, they skip the homepage as it doesn't have anything that the forum doesn't. I will look into implementing a "recent threads" module on the homepage.

Any further feedback is welcome. Keep it coming.

One more thought - I use mobile way more than desktop. The mobile new posts view is a nice, clean, simple list of unread threads and it would be hard to make such efficient use of space on mobile with extra news and imagery thrown in. Would take better design skills than mine, anyway!

DGCubes said:

the existing [ homepage ] seems a bit cleaner and easier to understand at a glance.

Click to expand...

I agree with this, plus the flashing changing videos are annoying. If videos, then perhaps put them in smaller stable screens, with descriptive stories to click on - but I like the current homepage better, as it is easier to see and navigate.

I usually check my subscriptions, the recently posted threads link, and do searches.