cabennett85/gittest — Issue #635: Redesign homepage
Author: cabennett85
Created: 2012-03-02 00:03:09+00:00
State: open

This is a medium/large-sized project that came out of a series of discussions and brainstorms that Tracy led. The primary purpose of this project is to establish a brand identity focused on "1st person stories covering a breadth of topics around life experiences".

The primary features of the homepage are (see attached mockup):

{{{
1. Large logo for brand identity
2. Tagline to give a quick sense of what EP is
3. experience counter illustrating scale and breadth of content on EP
4. featured story in the center depicts the primary type of content on EP (stories). The experience group is also shown to illustrate how stories are tied together by experience groups.
a. we show the story id number to imply the scale/breadth of EP's story content.
b. socialize section allows users to socialize our content. this section includes:
-Facebook share button
-Twitter share button
-Email link button
-Permalink for users who just want to share the link to the story
c. show the user in a way that implies that this story is written from a 1st person perspective and that it is raw and unedited (our content is not editorialized). Subtle things like adding a "Joined 2 months ago" show that this is an EP member, not EP staff member.
5. search bar implies breadth of content on EP ("search life's experiences") and supports the search use case.
a. prepulate the search bar with the current experience (I Believe in Education).
6. below the featured story is a list of 10-20 other stories to indicate the breadth of our content.
7. related groups section on the right illustrates breadth of topics on EP and allows for quick browsing. Clicking on a different experience will populate the search bar with that experience, pick a "good" story (undefined yet what "good" means, but it needs to be a high quality story, but at the same time it should be somewhat dynamic and change from time to time) in that experience group, and make that the featured story.
8. on the left we have a section that organizes EP as a site - it replaces the need to have the top navigation bar, and primarily organizes our site by content. This section includes:
a. "topics" (equivalent to categories)
b. links to jump to a random story or random experience
c. we can also add links to the other site verticals (Confessions, Q&A) as well as links to social campaigns and broadcause links.
}}}