Most forums have the same basic layout - Boring!

Forum Layouts

  • Total voters
    32
erich37 said:
that's very nice!

may I ask how you managed to put the images under the Forum-Nodes and have the forum-description showing when hovering over the image?
Thanks!
Click to expand...
Thanks for the compliment!

Heres an example of the first game, children of london, this is what is inside the node forum description

Code: 
<a href="http://www.waywardinn.com/forums/ChildrenOfLondon/"><img class="OverlayTrigger Tooltip" title="[Freeform – Historical Fantasy RP] In London, during the mid 1800’s, people were giving birth to strange new races and new born children gained magical powers through celestial familiars. You are a student at the Ambrose Institute for the Magically Inclined, where you learn the basics of life, from science to math. In addition to that, you have classes dedicated to learning how to utilize your magical power, and deal with your familiars."  src="http://cdn.waywardinn.com/banners/forum/childrenoflondon.jpg"/></a>

We follow that skeleton and just replace the descriptions and image links as needed.

If you or anyone else has any questions as to how we did anything please do not hesitate to ask me here or privately or anywhere really.
 
Fred Sherman said:
I disagree completely. Form and function are not interlinked. The function is to interact with the database. The form is how the data is displayed, entered and updated.


In an ideal world, the forum homepage would be a blank canvas. From that, any user can pick from a couple of different page layout. After that, they can drag and drop forum widgets onto their forum homepage layout and create the display they personally want. Every individual user experience could be as unique as every individual user.
Click to expand...

Except, that's not what most users want. They just want things to work without having to put in a lot of effort. Unless this ideal forum had an extremely simple and great on-boarding process, you'd probably just end up with a high bounce rate.

When working on My Yahoo, what we found is that most users don't want to take the time to customize their experience. Very few add/remove content, change themes, etc. It's the same reason Facebook doesn't have you curate your friends list or news feed (though you can do both things, sort of, if you take the initiative).

Bombard your users with too many options, and you'll only frustrate them and possibly lose them. The ability to customize your experience is great for power users, but it doesn't appear to be what the masses want.
 
I wouldn't say they're boring. What I would say that most of the experimental layouts just to be different I've seen are not practical, user friendly and an eyesore making navigation to areas stupid. Just to be different. I think I would prefer to have a "boring" layout that works than a layout that differs just to be different that is a UI nightmare.

The poll really doesn't reflect peoples opinions since your setting they;re opinions for them. You should have added stupid layouts that don't work like em much because they're different? :)

You link to this site newsground http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/ what is so special with this forum layout that differs from the crowd? Infact, the xenforo layout default as it may be pees all over they're forum layout and with the added bonus xenforo layout is user friendly.
 
I have sifted through the entire thread but as mention before xenporta accomplishes this look

NG uses a CMS and that's the front page you can always make a forum integrate into a cms.
This is what NG's forum looks like and it is IS boring http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/ as any other forum.

This structure works well and has always worked well. Until someone comes by and proves that this structure is old fashioned and comes up with a a new structure... then we're stock with
Category
- Sub Category
-sub sub category

And with my experience in running sites/being a webhost- You have to sacrifice beauty for function. MANY users don't have the common sense that daily web users like ourselves do. You wouldn't believe the outlandish requests people have had in the past.
 
0xym0r0n said:
I have sifted through the entire thread but as mention before xenporta accomplishes this look

NG uses a CMS and that's the front page you can always make a forum integrate into a cms.
This is what NG's forum looks like and it is IS boring http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/ as any other forum.

This structure works well and has always worked well. Until someone comes by and proves that this structure is old fashioned and comes up with a a new structure... then we're stock with
Category
- Sub Category
-sub sub category

And with my experience in running sites/being a webhost- You have to sacrifice beauty for function. MANY users don't have the common sense that daily web users like ourselves do. You wouldn't believe the outlandish requests people have had in the past.
Click to expand...
While I take functionality over beauty, I will be damned before I give up trying to make something as beautiful as possible with out sacrificing any functionality, its quite possible actually :D
 
Morgain said:
jt I like interesting interpretations certainly. My business community is pretty vanilla but my own personal community has given me long hours of custom fun.

www.housemorgain.co.uk/circle

It's still obviously a forum based community, but the navigation is strong and clear featuring What's On? outside the navbar as LATEST! on the side menu, as well as navbar. Also I brought the Quickmenu out and made it prominent on the sidebar.
Both the noticeboard area above the forums list and the sidebar offer you links to the main areas of the community.
The sidebar continues on almost all pages, looking just as it does on the front page.
The Library areas don't look like forums though they are built derivatively from forums; their threads/ Article pages feed into linked forum threads.

I use Nodes-As -Tabs quite extensively with LinkForums to make the navbar intuitively helpful (I hope).

My style is not at all a majority cup of tea and it's not meant to be. The site is not a business, and it's not about gaming, or any tightly focused niche. It's a broadminded little personal community of freedom lovers, mostly people I've collected over about 45 years.
If you don't like it you don't. We do.
Click to expand...
I really like what you've done with this. I like the way each Circle appears to have its own visual elements to tie them together and set them apart front he others. I even like the idea of the circle itself. Its contained, unique, stands alone. When I look at most of the circles, they're not anything I'd be interested it. If you have more of a generic layout, that would be enough to send me somewhere else.

But the Celtic circle? Thats a place to drag my Irish butt with a bottle of Jameson and hang out. I don't feel like I have to be part of the entire site. I'm okay in my circle.

You've done a brilliant job on so many levels.
 
Fred Sherman said:
I like the way each Circle appears to have its own visual elements to tie them together and set them apart front he others. I even like the idea of the circle itself. Its contained, unique, stands alone. When I look at most of the circles, they're not anything I'd be interested it. If you have more of a generic layout, that would be enough to send me somewhere else.
But the Celtic circle? Thats a place to drag my Irish butt with a bottle of Jameson and hang out. I don't feel like I have to be part of the entire site. I'm okay in my circle.
You've done a brilliant job on so many levels.
Click to expand...

Hey Fred I'm blushing thank you so much. You've understood a lot of it, more than most of my visitors. I should acknowledge Jake's brilliant template tweaks to get the visual results you admire, but the site concept is mine.
Circles are an important symbol to most of us in this community which is where the idea comes from - as you say enclosed space I claim as my own to share with others of like mind.
But actually the Circles overlap - Celtic with Goddess for example because Goddess is where a lot of the myths go - it's not just female. Gossip Circle has our clan news and world news items so that often means overlap - I use permanent redirects a lot here to duplicate items.
 

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