With well over 100,000 posts, and many more coming every day (and no sign of slowing, quite the opposite), it's becoming important to consider not only the layout of the site (and it's design), but how to make it easy to use.
So let's start off with some of the things I have done and the reason for doing it.
- The biggest change is the forum list on the left side on both the Portal page, the Forum view page, and the Topic view page. It's in exactly the same position on all three pages. Drilling down through the site from the front page has a feeling that the top and left side of the pages are in a frame, as they don't change.
- The links at the top (Home|Forums|Memberlist|FAQ|Search|PHP Wiki) are highlighted, and appear on the top of every page. They will eventually replace the default links that appear at the Top Center of the page. They stand out more, and are easier to read then the default links.
- Remove the title above the text "The Developer's Network". It was useless, and only served to take up vertical space.
- Attempted to shrink the vertical space needed to display the site. I was scrolling way to much to get to posts.I still feel like there is way to much weight at the top of the page, and we can thin it out. Most likely, a redrawing of the PHPDN logo to coincide with the push to be more developer centric, rather than simply PHP. Hopefully, by removing the default links at the top and moving them to the new bold links (described in the second point) will allow us to slim up the header.
- Finally moved the CSS out to its own file to make the pages much smaller. Now your browser can cache the CSS (why it took me so long, only God knows).
- Split the forums up a bit more, and added a few. This will hopefully solve the problem of having so much information available, no one knows where to look! Seriously, can we blame someone for feeling overwhelemed at the amount of information on these forums, and we aren't even considered a large forum (yet). By splitting up the forums, we stand a chance of cleanly separating topics into something that is more easily managed.
- Made the forums easier to use, and made using them more efficient.
- Shaken things up enough so that people realize that the old way really wasn't as efficient as it should be (honestly, it was down right inefficient).
Remember, we have the ability to make changes and test them out. It's not like we are going to suddenly loose sales.
