Talk:Main Page/redesign

This page had gotten a bit confusing, so I archived the old content at Talk:Main Page/redesign/archive of dicussion. I think the redesign is almost ready, but I read through the discussions and we have a few loose ends to tie up.

1. Any last suggestions for design, color scheme or content on this main page?
2. What should be included in the video column on the right? OpAphid? NBR? Immant? PaulMark?
3. Do we need any tweaks to the column on the left, or do we need to start working on some of the pages that the column on the left links to?
4. What exactly is the purpose of the Featured Article? What sort of articles do we pick and how?

I think once we've answered these questions, we're ready to take it live. We'll want to check in with TWJaniak of course. I'd like to put it up January 3rd. For now, I'd like to jump in on #4, as I think it's an important part of our page. I think the featured article should rotate about once a week. I think that, similar to other wikis, we should use the spot to feature interesting, well-done articles that people might not find otherwise. Some examples that I think could work -- meta-articles about the series like Down The Rabbit Hole that I worked on, the LG15 Soundtrack, really cool fan videos like Deemontreal, an interesting new page like Everything You Need To Play OpAphid when it was first created, or many of the theory pages like Water Theme. Other candidates could be old standbys that get a good reworking -- and of course there will be new pages that haven't been created yet. The other goal of a featured article section is to encourage people to write creative articles knowing that hard work will be prominently showcased.--JayHenry 12:07, 29 December 2006 (CST)

I'm glad you brought these things up. Here's what I'm thinking.

1. I think we need to play with the next color in the blue header bar. It seems a little too dark to read and it's hard to tell that there's links up there. Other than that, I think it looks great.
2. I'm not familiar with Immant or Paul Mark, but I do follow NBR and I'm usually just as excited to see a Nikki video as I am to see an official video. For that reason, I'd like to include the more prominant spinoffs such as Nikki Bower, but we would need to determine exactly which spinoffs we need to include and perhaps even make a policy page on it. Of course, I think we should include OpAphid even though not everyone (including myself) follows it. It is an official ARG, afterall.
3. As for the left column, what I wrote after the dashes needs to be rewritten or tweaked. And the bulleted items might do better in a different order, but I'll leave that up to you guys.
4. Personally, I'm thinking that rotating the featured article once a week is just right. Not too often, but not to far apart, either. I think we need to develop a page which will list all the previous featured articles, and maybe even a small template to include on the article's page (something like a small box at the bottom of the article that says "This article was featured during the week of January 7th, 2007."). We also need a place for editors to suggest articles. This would be a great way to get the entire core editing community to focus on several articles to get them to a "featured article standard" or something. As for what to include, I think we should definietly NOT include videos, characters, or locations. Other than that, I think JayHenry's suggestions about what to include were great.

--Andy 14:27, 29 December 2006 (CST)

Andy, I think I fixed what you had in mind about the links in the header bar. Let me know if this is what you meant.--JayHenry 17:26, 29 December 2006 (CST)

I also edited back in the "add new video" button, which I think is a useful feature. Lemme know if anyone agrees. Not sure exactly where to put the thing, and I'm heading off for the weekend. Can fix or move it early next week.--JayHenry 17:57, 29 December 2006 (CST)

Both the header and the "add new video" link looks great, in my opinion. --Andy 23:12, 29 December 2006 (CST)

omg, I am in the presence of geniouses!!! Hehehe, lately I haven't been around as much as I would like to be, but I think the new page looks great! I really like JayHenry's suggestions for Featured articles (might I also suggest Tracking device?). The work on vid Template and such is fantastic. I won't be around much for a few more days still, but I hope I'll have a chance to check in every now and then. In the meantime, I just wanted to express my appreciation for the talented team of people that has put this together =) Happy (early) New Year!

OwenIsCool 23:56, 29 December 2006 (CST)

PS Don't feel bad deleting my comment if the page gets cluttered again; no biggie!