Had to dust off my graphic design skills for a few design changes I'm doing to ehMac. This is a first draft. All the design changes are mostly for functional purposes which I'll outline below:
- I want the site to be more attractive to visitors (And existing members). ehMac.ca gets 90% of its traffic from web surfers doing Google searches for mostly Mac related topics. Right now, the site has a fairly high "bounce rate" (Users coming to the site and not hanging around) which was mostly due to the layout I had for visitors, but also because I don't think it was really clear what the site was about. The mockup contains some design elements of Mac and iOS products, more clearly showing what the site is about. Front and centre is our beloved friendly mascot and "Canada's Mac Community" word-mark. Later this year, we'll be seeing some more cool ehMac merchandise. :heybaby:
- Right now, there is sort of two navigation bars, and if technically possible, this will be reduced to one (And the formatting will be fixed to not show up weird in certain browsers.)
- The "content" and posts are much, much higher up on the page with the different ad format and layout. This should get more visitors reading the posts and getting involved. I think the login and registration areas are more prominent and clear as well.
- I know not everyone is into social media sites, but many people are (Including companies wanting to advertise on the site) so there are some prominent buttons to ehMac's social media sites, and for an improved Google search link that will be set to just search ehMac.ca. The feedback I have gotten is that this works 10x better than vBulletin's search feature.
- There will be some smaller sized ads to the left. For members who upgrade their membership, they will not see these ads.
- With wide screens more relevant and lots of content coming larger and larger, we're moving to a wider format version of the site. Those who already use the Liquid theme will feel right at home.
The rest is pretty much the same.
I am going to be bring the "News & Reviews" section back. The forum is going to stay the main page (At least for now) and the news section will be used to post product reviews that I do, YouTube videos and also when we want to have a live chat during an event.
Might be some tweaking yet, but this is the first step in some changes to ehMac over the year.
- I want the site to be more attractive to visitors (And existing members). ehMac.ca gets 90% of its traffic from web surfers doing Google searches for mostly Mac related topics. Right now, the site has a fairly high "bounce rate" (Users coming to the site and not hanging around) which was mostly due to the layout I had for visitors, but also because I don't think it was really clear what the site was about. The mockup contains some design elements of Mac and iOS products, more clearly showing what the site is about. Front and centre is our beloved friendly mascot and "Canada's Mac Community" word-mark. Later this year, we'll be seeing some more cool ehMac merchandise. :heybaby:
- Right now, there is sort of two navigation bars, and if technically possible, this will be reduced to one (And the formatting will be fixed to not show up weird in certain browsers.)
- The "content" and posts are much, much higher up on the page with the different ad format and layout. This should get more visitors reading the posts and getting involved. I think the login and registration areas are more prominent and clear as well.
- I know not everyone is into social media sites, but many people are (Including companies wanting to advertise on the site) so there are some prominent buttons to ehMac's social media sites, and for an improved Google search link that will be set to just search ehMac.ca. The feedback I have gotten is that this works 10x better than vBulletin's search feature.
- There will be some smaller sized ads to the left. For members who upgrade their membership, they will not see these ads.
- With wide screens more relevant and lots of content coming larger and larger, we're moving to a wider format version of the site. Those who already use the Liquid theme will feel right at home.
The rest is pretty much the same.
I am going to be bring the "News & Reviews" section back. The forum is going to stay the main page (At least for now) and the news section will be used to post product reviews that I do, YouTube videos and also when we want to have a live chat during an event.
Might be some tweaking yet, but this is the first step in some changes to ehMac over the year.