frontpage redesign

Thoughts about the stages of the indy uk front page redesign

First Iteration of design (5/3/09)

I am developing a possible new startpage for imc-uk at http://mish.dev.indymedia.org.uk/en/ Scroll down to see the open newswire appear next to the promoted newswire. I’ve reduced the number of items in the newswires, but not the features as yet.

The CSS needs some tweaking. In particular,

  • the design prob won’t work well on small screens.
  • the title of the open newswire isn’t aligned well

The old startpage still exists and can be viewed at mish.dev.indymedia.org.uk/en/oldindex.html

Items to be done before this is finished

  • On the new front page, I intend to make the titles ‘Open Newswire’ and ‘Promoted Newswire’ link to the old index page.

So the question is: do people like this set up? It’s not the end point, but I’d like to get this out now, and then slowly work through the changes to build towards the lovely thing wietse and co made :)

So give us some feedback. If people like it (now or after a few tweaks) I’ll make a formal proposal to deploy it to the main site.

Chris: I’d like to see it more polished before we go live with it

And for the techies, I haven’t checked anything into css, so if you want to look at the files, log in to pulp and look around /mir/mish/mir/etc/producer (email me if you need a log in or other help).

debates raised by others

this is to summarise views of people replied in email

unresolved

The main issue appears to be whether the promoted wire or open wire should be in the right column.

mish I favour the promoted wire, but am open
to persuasion.
ana if it is one of the other, I’d go with the promoted one.

which wire should be the prime wire (ie start at the top) – promoted or open

mish – Thinking about it I prefer having the promoted wire as the primary when both are on the same page. But it is simple to swap them if most people would rather they were swapped.
ana – I support the promoted wire as the primary, although – I’d prefer the promoted one as the “only one” on the front page, and the open wire one click away, like the have in Germany

what is optimum number of features and newswire links

how long do we want the page to be?

layout

ben suggested just having a few open newswire items at the top of the right column, followed by the promoted newswire.

resolved

none yet …

later/wishlist

  • change left column to be shorter/expanding (see sample design )
  • have newswire and feature columns be the same length
  • reposts
  • include content from bristol, london, scotland and york
  • regional box – set this region as your home region, this can be done with the same ssi / cookie stuff as the current wire selection stuff – chris can help with this

previous work

A design with working css

imcuk.isthisnottingham.co.uk/

On the old wiki, see

docs.indymedia.org/bin/view/Local/ImcUk...
docs.indymedia.org/bin/view/Local/ImcUk...