April 11th, 2020 at 10:48 PM
Hello community!
We are, for the first time in six years, reconsidering some of our board layout. We're still a tight knit, small forum, so we don't need a huge number of boards. However, we're making a goal to shuffle a few things around and will probably a board or two in the process. We need suggestions on what you think needs improvement. I've done as many mockups as I can, and something just isn't quite sticking yet.
The main problem we're having now is that project journals are kind of shuffled throughout the forum. That was actually something the original Makestation solved with its initial layout. We had designated sections for ideas, creativity discussion, and project journals, and these boards would contain just about any niche. The issue was that ALL project journals went into one board. You'd visit that one board and you'd see almost any topic imagineable.
We ended up splitting them out by the topic (media, technology, writing, etc.) and putting a project journals sub-board in each category. It kept things a little more organized at the time. We're looking into some other improvements, so I wanted to get an idea of whether you guys would use these, and most importantly, for inspiration from the community. Current ideas in the pipeline:
We are, for the first time in six years, reconsidering some of our board layout. We're still a tight knit, small forum, so we don't need a huge number of boards. However, we're making a goal to shuffle a few things around and will probably a board or two in the process. We need suggestions on what you think needs improvement. I've done as many mockups as I can, and something just isn't quite sticking yet.
The main problem we're having now is that project journals are kind of shuffled throughout the forum. That was actually something the original Makestation solved with its initial layout. We had designated sections for ideas, creativity discussion, and project journals, and these boards would contain just about any niche. The issue was that ALL project journals went into one board. You'd visit that one board and you'd see almost any topic imagineable.
We ended up splitting them out by the topic (media, technology, writing, etc.) and putting a project journals sub-board in each category. It kept things a little more organized at the time. We're looking into some other improvements, so I wanted to get an idea of whether you guys would use these, and most importantly, for inspiration from the community. Current ideas in the pipeline:
- Threadmarks. This is a specialized table of contents for project journal threads you create. If you write an update or another post, you can hit "add threadmark" when you add the post and it gets added to your table of contents. No feature exists within our forum software for this, and there is no plugin. We will have to write our own. I will happily do so, but I want to get an idea of whether or not people think it's useful before we go ahead and give it the green light.
- Project Journal list in profiles. Profiles have been heavily revamped in recent months on the forum. Ideally, we want the community to be as profile-centered as possible, so we've been adding new features for them. This would also require a special plugin, but if they'd be useful, we will write one.
