Big Design Change

Well you know me by now....certainly not bashful. I like the simplicity quite well. However, I don't know if you are still working on it, or, if my puter is just not picking up the main bg. It is really stark white on my end. It may just be on my end I don't know. But, what little brain I left from my desiging days.....we were always told not to go with a stark white as it hurts many people's eyes and makes it difficult for them to focus. Well ....now you know never ask me for input...right? Other than that it is looking grand I would say.

Snickell, I liked the homepage. It's kept very simple and neat. And I appreciate your hard work done. :)

But, allow me to ask a question. I remember the previous template and when I compare this one with the previous one, there were many direct links like recent active community discussions, latest topics and many other links to reach the forums in the previous one. The current template only has five to six active links to enter the forums. Isn't this template having less number of clicks to enter the forums from the previous one? I mean if we are talking about making the forums much more prominent, the ways to access the forums is less but I agree, it's a strong hit.

Will it be a good thought to include the latest topics and the recent active community discussions in the current template?

I have to agree with Moondanzer. I am not a big fan of the white background. I think it gives it kind of a plain look. I like what it says, but just a little something to make it a little more eye catching.

I like the professional look however I agree that it needs to catch the eye...Maybe a brighter color....I think whatever is done it's going to be still a great tool to access for everyones needs. Thanks for taking the time/effort to make it a worth while application.

I like the homepage as it is now.Nice looking & at the same time uncluttered.

I like the way that it looks too and the way things are worded!!!

I guess for me the white is so bright. I like the softer colors, a little easier on the eyes.

I'm thinking:

A link that will bring up all (new) posts within the last 8/16/24 hours...

To help keep members from jumping ship, an ignore member option (bans PM/QM from the designated member, ignored member's posts not visible to the ignoring member (and vice-versa).

A button in each post that you can use to report spam in-as opposed to the current spam thread.

I think that the area with the link to the forums should be bigger and closer to the top of the page. Morningstar, I like your ideas about the new posts, ignore member and the spam button!

It made me do a double take.

Mishele - it made me do a double take too - I thought I was on the wrong page!

I like the design change - I think it's a nice change from the old one. It really does bring out the human touch.

Okay here I go again....I do really like the simplicity. However, I think the white is to plain and too bright, and, I think the very light purple header is just a little too light. Bright white and very light colors are very difficult for many older people, color blind, and, people with vision problems. At least that was what we were taught... about a hundred years ago..lol!! okies I shut-up now :wink:

Cool, I was afraid nobody would give me feedback. I should have counted on at least Moondanzer ;-) Thanks everybody (especially for the positive feedback, the rest of you are on probation ;-) ;-) ;-) )

FlyingCats: I think you are right, but for some technical reasons, it was easier to get something going initially that was "static". The plan was to do this, see if it lowers the number of people who visit from google and then immediately leave after a couple seconds (this is like 70% or something!!!)... and then if that's effective we'll fit some dynamic content on it. It is worth noting that after looking through all the statistics on the web server, almost nobody clicks on the dynamic stuff like the recent posts, and they're not enough text to read which makes me think people aren't really reading them either. Sometimes its really important to look at the hard data and figure out what people are actually doing, vs what we are hoping they'll do. So.... short answer is "yes, that's coming back in a week or so when I have the time to do harder stuff" *grin* My intuition is similar to yours, despite what the data says.... I think it is the sort of thing that will draw the people into the community, even if they don't click right away. What's cool is, because the page is so much shorter, they may actually see it on the new page, as opposed to having to scroll down 3 pages first. A good principle of design: new users can't read, and even if they could, they wouldn't want to. ;-)

So white.... I think people aren't responding so much to the white background as extensive use of "white space", because the original page was white background too (as are 95% of pages on the internet). So one quick idea would be to put coloured bars on the side where the page expands, like how some people do with a blog?

I feel the catagories in the forum speak for themselves and are easy to navigate. As to the "quick fix" some people are looking for, it's probably because, many are in panic mode the first time they visit here.

I thought it was a lot of fun! I never really liked the somewhat "pretentious" feel of the old home page..This is worded towards everyman without patronizing. A color change would be nice, though..BUT the white grabs your eye and makes you read it. Overall I think it's a change for the better.

Well guest :wink: I think you are doing a great job. And yes before the original page was white, however, it was absolutely covered with text. I have total faith that you will get this all worked out. And why should we want to be like the rest of Google? This is a very specail forum....nothing like anythingelse I have seen on Google. I am just so grateful that you didn't go with all the new high techy flashy junk that most people can't navigate through. I can't wait to see the final outcome. But, I agree with you 100% about making the initial page very simple and quick to read and navigate. The older page was somewhat overwhelming.....you are doing a great job...just add a little color as you suggested. It just needs a little more contrast...and it's done! TYVM guest :wink: for your comments and your contributions!

Good golly miss Molly I think you got it! The black under bg is just what it needed! It's looking really good! 8) Except possibly just a little tweaking with that purple header....it looks just a little bland...maybe just a little more tweaking there? It's just a little too blended....maybe just a little more contrast? Just a wee suggestion....but all in all it's looking really good now. Okay I really will try to stop critiqing now. It's just the artist in me...my duel personality...there that sounds like a good excuse. You guys are really doing a great job...I have no doubt that this site will be Google's #1....if you fix that purple header :lol: just kidding....I really do know just how very difficult design is. I am going away now....and, I will try very hard... not to critique anymore.

I'm glad we're heading in a positive direction Moondanzer :) Thanks for pointing out the white, I agree this looks better too.

I'm probably going to do a few more total redesigns of this page, and we'll try them out in upcoming weeks and see how people react to them (both on the forums, and how many people end up joining the forums as a result). Its gonna be interesting times ;-)

One of the big complexities I run into here is that I'm trying to balance a lot of interaction design concerns in addition to the visual design, which is a hard balance to strike. When you're redoing everything from the text to the images... well there's a lot of variables up in the air. So bear with me everyone as they start to settle!

Keep the criticism coming, as long as you're ok with me sometimes being stubborn, hee hee.

Hey you have my vote! I am even getting used to the purple header!

Would also be nice to send PMs to multiple members.

I use a link directly to the forum page, so I had to go to the home page and see what was up.

I like it. Simple. Simple is sometimes the best. About the only thing I might think to add is a link to the "do it yourself" section. I am sure a lot of traffic just don't want to talk about their debt with someone, for a lot of reasons. Pride, mostly, I guess. So maybe, under the box that asks for info about them for a free consultation, make a little blurb about "Or, maybe you want to do it yourself? Well, click here...." blah blah blah.

You get what I mean, I hope.

It through me for a loop again tonight when I logged on here. It's growing on me though. Change is good. Well most of the time :lol:

More changes! well, I was up all night working on this, but I'm pretty excited about it, I must say. Tell me what you think (and no colour complaints either, or I send you packing, heh heh... j/k :-)

I think this really brings out the actual content... the forums themselves... to the main page in a way that's going to draw people straight into the forums. Cool! And the new posts are tantalizing by actually being in a place on the page that shows people lots of stuff is happening (hundreds of new posts each day!!!).... as opposed to being buried a few pagedowns down like on the old page.

(PS to moondanzer... its an interesting problem with the way CRTs are calibrated and how people perceive a colour palette built from triads, but if you look at the RGB values for the header... you'll find that it actually is pure blue, albeit a light shade... no red value at all.... what's happening is that at lighter shades our perceptions actually *skew* due to different amounts of energy hitting cones in our retinas at different wavelengths. we get more sensitive to red as the total energy goes up (people do not perceive colour linearly)... so you tend to see more red than actually exists). to get a really light blue that doesn't look purple on a computer crt you often need to interject a little green into it to balance out the red... ah well, maybe when I get less lazy)

WoW Snickell, you have done few more changes on the homepage, and trust me, it looks much better from the previous one, you had last week. I saw google crawled the previous template on 20th.

Adding on links to the recent community discussions gives a feeling of staying in touch with the community. You can actually peep in what's going around in the group. The color combination is great. I will say this presentation of community topics is much better from the earlier one we had in the website.

With adding of some more content, the homepage is giving a real feeling and what to be expected from this community. Everything looks real, nothing fancy or exaggerated stuff.. You remained awake all night, so you were flowing with different ideas in your mind. It's really done very nicely.

I feel that you may put a link to the ranking chart somewhere in the content. It might be helpful to show people the list of companies from whom they will be getting free quotes. Jedijeff also has a strong point about adding the link to "do it yourself" section. You are an expert, and you know the pros and cons about these technical stuff.

Now who said anything about color :shock: I think it really, really looks good. It's very simple and straightforward and also pleasing. It's simply Mawvelous dahling! :wink:

perhaps a direct login link (if there is one I couldn't find it. The main page seems a bit busy. I will look at it some more and try and give some more detail

I am usure if this is my locked down security configuration or it is the forum. I post on multiple web sites and for some reason if I do not refresh here at least every thirty minutes,I am logged off automatically. If we could have some type of persistant cookie,I would be set!

I'm glad you're seeing this problem cajunbulldog... because I thought I was taking crazy pills! That keeps happening to me too, and the current site doesn't really show you at the top of the page if you are logged in or not, so I keep not noticing it and posting as guest *shakes his fist* Out of curiosity, what web browser are you using?

A couple of people have mentioned this, and I agree in principle, but I'm scared of the DIY section as it stands right now. The best way to understand the psychology and behavior of new website visitors is to think of them as spooked cats. They show up all edgy and nervous, ready to dart away in a random direction at a moment's notice. MOST people who show up at the homepages of MOST websites will click something sorta randomly, and then they'll either get spooked and run away from the website totally, or they'll slowly calm down, lick their paws, and start looking around. I think the DIY section is a great thing, but the way its' currently designed and written ... it can be a little intimidating. So I'm worried about making it too prominent before we start redesigning it a bit.

I have some amazing news though!

But first... a little background: Most people (like 85%) who find the homepage of this site through Yahoo/Google (which is actually not most new visitors... most new visitors find the forums page in a specific search, which is super cool... getting straight to info they need!!!) do it using a search for "debt consolidation". In a way, the home page is "designed for them", while making sure other people are accomodated. We don't want to get in the way of what they think they want, that's bad design (and if we feel like we're getting in their way too much, they'll just run and click on a different random website in google), but we also want to mildly suggest some other things like the forums that can catch their eye and draw them in.

In a cruel twist of fate, 1 day prior to the redesign going live, debtcc dropped in the Google rankings from #1 to #4 for "debt consolidation", and the number of new visitors plummetted by about 40%. Since long term, new users asking questions, a few of them becoming long term members etc is the lifeblood of a community... this was a very very bad sign (and its VERY hard to get higher in google ranks again, that is something we will need to work on together to keep getting new people who need this site to find it... but I'll talk more about how we can accomplish that later).

With the new description of the site (part of the redesign... the words that show up in google), even though we are still #4... we actually have an increase of 65% in the number of google visitors who click to view this site. If you figure we are getting over a 40% drop from the rankings, that's more like a 105% increase, which means double. Cool! And guess what? The percentage of those people who are clicking through to the forums is itself about double. So the forums are getting about 4x the number of people coming from Google looking for "debt consolidation" as compared to the old home page. Now we have to figure out how to get more of those people to stick around in the forums, which will be the NEXT design task. But still, cool!!!

I use mozilla firefox,wouldn't trust gates software furthter than I could launch him! :lol: :lol:

Like others, I had to do a double take and make sure I was at the right site. I like that there is a focal-point intended to draw a new user into the site's purpose. But I consider the following:

I find it a little hard to "get into" the site. The homepage is really geared toward me giving all my personal info to someone I don't know yet, and signing up for consolidation. It also gives the impression that I HAVE to sign up.

From a personal standpoint, I never came to this site for consolidation. I came here for all the other features on this site. Putting such an emphasis on me signing up might have scared me away 8 months ago. To me it's kind of like "Give us your info and sign up first, then we'll tell you what the rest of the site has to offer."

Really the only other option I have from the homepage is to go right into the forums. Yet the links the the active forums are small and kind of "out of the way" (almost like a small caption describing the 5 recent posts above). I think it takes emphasis off of the forums and makes them seem less important.

I liked that the old homepage had a lot of options. I could look around first, and see everything there was to see. And then I could sign up if I liked what I saw. In general, I just think is should be easier for me to "get inside" and navigate around the site. Put up a navigation bar, or a sidebar, or something of that sort. Make me want to click around and see what else is on the site.

Aside from that, the color blue is the universal color for depression. Having dark borders on the side, and blue all over the place, makes it seem a bit depressing of itself. Not that we should have rainbows all over, but splash some different colors around to make it more appealing.

Debt Cruncher, very interesting thoughts to work on. I never knew that blue is the color of depression. I thought it symbolizes the open sky and some good fortunes. Your comments really put me to think.

Snickell, are you busy? Here's some food for thought from Debt Cruncher. Very interesting!!

Hi DC :-)

I'll try to respond, but its tough partly because I don't think I can convince you (or anyone, really). I certainely know my reactions to designs are primarily intuitive, and its extremely hard to convince me through reasoning.... the way we sum up and understand a design happens extremely quickly (seconds), reasoning and argumentation are primarily applied "backwards" at a later time to support that intuition not the other direction.

So I don't want to *try* to sway you, because I think response is totally individual and valid, and I don't think its the kind of thing that can or should be swayed. Nevertheless, its still interesting to grapple with thoughts so I'll respond to those! Responses to designs are always highly individual, the role of the designer is not to please everyone, but more akin to finding a design that works best "on average" (whatever the hell that means).

Color Psychology - this is more pop psychology than a rubrick used by product designers, because there's not a lot of universal reaction to colours, and the world around us is *saturated* with different colours for different purposes. red for blood, red for stop, red for affection, brown for filth, brown for natural, black for depression, black for hate, orange for danger, yellow for caution, pink for female, yellow for cheerful, orange for high design, etc etc. Even if you believe color pyschology, sky blue is not depression blue by any stretch of the imagination. The primary colour of Apple's OS X (probably the most designed piece of software on the planet) is a sky blue. etc.

About all I can say about colours is: at the end of the day, they only matter toward attractiveness and how they draw the eye, and every colour can be used attractively or for attention getting or not in most every context.


The current page *dramatically* emphasizes the forums relative to the other pages. There are hard numbers on this. Like I said before, *four times* the number of google searchers who land on the home page are visiting the forums relative to the old design. Most users who land on the home page are in fact looking for debt consolidaiton, and its bad design to try (too hard...) to push people off to something they don't want. By putting the forums at the top, including the actual *categories* in the content to lure you into specific forums, and emphasizing them as the point of the site, I am putting huge hooks to putting looking for consolidation to consider other options. The numbers speak for themselves, nuff' said ;-)

Rather, the current page dramatically emphasizes the forums when compared with the old home page. 4x is a big multiplier. The most common response to the (extremely cluttered) old page was to just immediately leave.