Topic: Hmmm...what should I read first?

My God man is it just me or has multifamily INSIDERS Home Page gotten too crazy busy with stuff?

Thanks for the feedback, Gabriele! The only way we get better is to hear stuff like that. We'd like to hear from others in the crowd, as well, and we posted a poll about it!

For those that think the home page is a bit overwhelming, can you all give some feedback on what should stay and what should go?

Thanks!!

I am leaning toward Gabriele's position. Maybe a rotation of blogs, discussions, groups etc. would serve well to temper the craziness - that is to say one at a time as opposed to all three at the same time.

Ok, first of all, thanks for the feedback! Second, this is going to be a challenge. I'm not sure rotating will work because then the view they get will always be different, which could confuse the user. Plus, if we expect the member to click on the links on the side to get into the different sections, we are likely out of luck. So it becomes a question of how to summarize the majority of the site in an easy-to-read package!

Please keep the feedback coming!

I believe that when we present a problem, we should present possible solutions; so here are a few Brent, to help you out. :o)

I suggest we free up horizontal space by having drop-down's at the top of the page for the main menu and the dashboard.

There appears to be about 4 sponsor banners/ads, I recommend decreasing that number.

I would move the social buttons, probably to the bottom. And I would add the Popular Topics to the Main Menu.

You can make the Poll like a sponsor banner, let it rotate? Or, move it to the right panel.

We also do not need our own profile picture visible on the site, it just takes up space. The Login/Logout is usually found in the upper right corner of sites, so that might clear up your entire left panel.

I hope my suggestions give you some ideas for ways to free up the home page and subsequent pages.

-Charity

Thanks for the great suggestions, Charity! A few comments:

We will be removing one of the sponsor banners as it is legacy and essentially a duplicate of another. For those that are in the top right section, we will move to the left banner...

We don't have tracking on the social buttons, but if I were a betting man, I would say they aren't being used that much in the first place...

As for the removing the left panel entirely, that will have to be a bigger decision. In actuality, that is the only constant throughout the site, as often the right column disappears. This might be something we should experiment with on our version of the site...

Thanks for all the feedback, and you are right: Without getting specifics, it is hard for us to figure out exactly what our membership is asking for!

Ok, we've made a few changes, so hopefully that cleaned it up just a bit. Still thinking about moving the login area to the top right, but that will take a little bit of styling effort, so it might take a bit of time. Aside from removing the entire left column, how is it looking now?

It does look better! Thanks Brent!

To help, I recommend removing the tag cloud and putting the blog archive under the list of bloggers. Then, put latest comments on the left under the dashboard.

Charity - Liked your comments and implemented it! Does it look a little better now? The only thing that I'm not sure about is that the latest comments show up on the right side on the home page, but on the left in the blogs section - is that inconsistency confusing at all?

Looks much better Brent! :o)