2021 update
I think it's nice to post an update, a lot has changed 🙂
Home page
In august 2020 we've updated the home page, now it doesn't show the discussions but it gives a global view of what's going on. We've made the showcase and tutorials more prominent and the discussions and posts are shown in the three columns on the bottom of the page.
Avatars and images in the discussion list
Previously in the older version of DevNL, we removed the avatar from the discussion list and only showed simple information like the tags, last reply date, amount of replies and views. After a while we found out that is was missing the 'personal touch'. Also, the discussion list was a little bit boring, lot's of text.
In February this year we stepped away from the square design and started to work on the make-over. We gave discussions more space from eachother and added the avatar again. We have showcase discussions an image to get a view what kind of project it is.
When browsing through the list now, looks more dynamic and gives a good view about what's going on.
Guests
We got feedback from new users that it wasn't really clear what DevNL exactly was when they entered the website for the first time. It was looking great, but it didn't knew where they were looking at so people went away quickly thinking it wasn't what they were searching for (but then went back as they found it again in the search results).
This is why we added a new message for guests who aren't logged in. It summarises what DevNL is, what we do and what kind of community we are. It also has three call to action buttons: 'Login', 'Create account' and 'Read more about DevNL'. This way we give them enough options to join the community.
When browsing the discussion list, the same message is displayed once between two discussions.
Relevant discussions
When reaching the bottom of a discussion, we don't want them to go away and interact more. So we added a 'Maybe also interesting' block which contains three random discussions. If they don't like the list, they can reload the list
This list is randomly generated and will show discussions based on three paramters:
- Discussions that are in one of the tags from the current discussion
- Discussions from the same user
Tags page
Since the last screenshot of our tags page, we have slightly changed the design a bit. We've added a category filter, showed icons and gived it a slightly more rounded design.
Best answer
We also slightly updated the best answer design, it now only shows a part of the answer (because, to be honest, the full message in green is very ugly). Looks much better now 🙂
Feedback
If you have any feedback or ideas, let me know! 🙂
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