How do you navigate this site?

Some one who is new to F:AT is going to navigate our site much differently than a member who reads regularly. I want to create a login redirect to a member front page optimized for our regular readers (i.e. less stuff=faster load).

How many articles do you like having on the front page?
How many thumbnails (title, plus limited introtext, like what is in the right hand column now)?
How many title links (like what is on the bottom of the page)?
Do you use the popular article list?

I know people use the most recent comments list. Would you like more recent comments displayed? Fewer?

Is there something else that we should have on the member front page that would be helpful?

Just for discussion sake, I'm going to take the current home page down to 1 article and 5 thumbnails to get feedback and start discussion.

Okay. We now have a HOME and a FRONT PAGE in the top menu, so we can play and compare. I want to put a bunch of stuff on the HOME page that probably won't be of interest to regular readers, but would give newbies a better feel of the site, while fine tuning the FRONT PAGE for regular readers.

I'm playing with stuff now, so keep the feedback coming.

For clarification -

TITLE LINKS are when there is just a title that you can click on with out any intro test.
THUMBNAILS are when there is a title link and a short bit of into text in a box or column apart.

I can change what I have done. But this is what have currently set up.

Home: This is where newbies will land, or people who aren't logged in.

I have only two articles, but I have added 7 featured articles with thumbnail pictures. I also have the popular Articles and Blog entries. The reason I did this is landing on a new site and getting 5 articles to scroll down through is kind of overwhelming, plus those big pictures can take forever to load. The seven featured articles are the latest articles pulled from our various sections, so it shows a little of everything. I also think the many little thumbnails makes the page more visually interesting.

Front Page: Where you get You can click on the menu button to go here, or book mark this page if you want to bypass the home page.

I have the 5 most recent articles plus the 10 most recent comments.

Eventually I would also like to get recent forum posts on this page as well, but the last time we got server errors, so I have to look for a better solution.

Tom & Ken,

One of the goals of this little project is to reduce load times for both people who land here for the first time, and for regular readers. Our old HOME page was way too big, and loaded way too slowly.

If we put both the thumbnails and 5 articles on the same page, the page size becomes huge (particularly when some authors *cough*Barnes*cough* puts up 600KB pictures). Load time gets to the point that unless you have a very fast connection, a visitor will be staring at a blank page for longer than most people are willing to wait, and they will simply say, "screw it" and navigate away. Not to mention that the information displayed is redundant.

For this reason I have only put two articles on the HOME page. The thumb nails provide an idea of the type of content that a new reader will find here. If it interests them they will stay and poke around. It's the same concept as the landing page for BGG. I bet you haven't been there in a while. It just shows a sample of what is in the site.

The thumbnails are cool, but aren't particularly useful to a regular reader. They are just showing a selection of recent articles. If someone reads regularly, after a couple of weeks they will have seen every article displayed in the thumbnails. It seems more useful for a regular reader to just land on a page that displays the most recent articles. I've put up 5 on the FRONT PAGE since that typically represents about a weeks worth of articles, so someone who reads once a week, can see everything that's been put up since their last visit. In that respect it's kind of Blog like. If a regular reader really wants to watch the thumbnails change, they can just go to the HOME page and reload it over and over until something catches their eye. It's nice eye candy, but I think the novelty will wear off pretty fast. As I said, it will just be showing them things they have probably already read. If they are looking for something specific, it is probably more efficient to use the ARTICLES menu and browse by section, or use the search.

As it stands now, I'm still trying to cut down the size of our pages and reduce the number of scripts and calls that are executed. I'll probably also be bringing the site down briefly some evening this week to clean up the database and do some archiving.