I've been doing a lot of analysis and research on the home page of MLS. I'm not very thrilled with the current home page. It just doesn't reflect the dynamic nature of the site and all that goes on. Apart from the default forum page and the active topics page, the homepage is the most visited page on MLS. It also has one of the highest bounce rates (People that only look at 1 page and leave.) I suspect that is because the content on the homepage only changes once per month or so. (Although I hope that will change as I get DNN online.) I hide all the ads in the left column for paying members of the site. In the right hand column, there's a link to help that rarely gets used, and a poll system. I can never come up with good poll questions, so it keeps the same ol' boring poll for months. The welcome at the top was an attempt to get into search engines, which I think was somewhat successful, but it takes up too much room. The photo changes each month. It's the winner of a contest between all the members on the site. Everyone votes and the winner gets a prize. I manually have to change this image each month. Below the image is more intro fluff to try and get SE placement. Then finally, WAY below the fold, is the latest news. I also manually update this text each month.
In an effort to get the bounce rate down, I want to redesign the page to either lead these visitors deeper into the site, or leave by way of one of the pay per click ads from Google or eBay. In addition, I need to make the home page easier to update with news and images. With these goals in mind, I set about trying to cram everything I could onto the 1024x768 homepage including the kitchen sink. I moved stuff around constantly, trying all sorts of configurations. Nothing ever really looked right. Things were squeezed and too hard to read, or not there at all. The ads were again banished over to the left hand side, out of sight out of mind. I wasn't getting anywhere, but I WAS getting frustrated. I sat down with my wife one night and asked her what she thought of the page. She's no exert in the field of web design, but she sure looks at a lot of web pages, so her opinion would do! She agreed that stuff was crammed in and difficult to read. I explained that I wanted to get all these different elements in, but was having a difficult time getting them to look right all together. She then suggested that maybe scrolling some of the content would help.
Now I'm not a fan of animated web pages and moving stuff in general, but this did get me to thinking. What else could I do to get everything there easily accesible and used maybe the same principal of not showing all the content at once? Then it hit me, a lightbulb illuminated above my head. Maybe I could use some CSS tabs or something like that. The thought of creating the tabs scared the daylights out of me, I'll be honest. Then I thought, maybe there's a module already out there for this. Off to snowcovered I went. After a few minutes of searching, there it was, AJAX Tabs by Gumbosoft.. The solution to all my problems. This module allowed me to put the top posts module and the recent blog entries module on their own tabs right at the top of the page. The AJAX tabs also can be scheduled to appear and disappear based on dates, so I can put a membership special, or a special show report or something else on a tab to promote it, and schedule it to automatically appear when I want it to. I cut the size of the photo contest winner down a little bit. I didn't want it to overshadow the whole page and stick out like a sore thumb like it was before. Here's what I've come up with:
As you can see, it's very similar to the old page with some refinements. The ads on the left will stay there, though I will re-arrange them so that the eBay ad is on top (My best performing ad by far), then followed by the GR magazine ad and then an Amazon.com ad. (Don't know why I bother with that one.) The Google adsense ads have been moved from the left column to right under the photo winner and recent content tabs. I'm hoping that this placement will help improve the adsense performance. My adsense revenue has been consistently trending downwards for the last couple years. I didn't meet the $100 minimum check amount this September, the first time ever since joining adsense. I've been in the program for 4 years. I'll rant some other time about adsense and my beef with the way things have been going.As before, the ads in the left hand column and the adsense ads will be hidden for paying members. This is done using Scott McCulloch's subscription content module. A very handy utility I must say. There will still be a banner in the top right corner from one of my directly related sponsors. I'll be using the DNN banner ad module for that.
Just under the ads, is my latest news section. In order to keep me off the homepage, I'm using the active forums top posts module again. I've created a special group in the forums that will be just for my "Dispatch" or news updates. When I make a post in there, it will automatically show up on the home page in it's entirety. Cool.. Then below the latest news, the intro text. Hopefully it's not too far down the page for search engines. Another thought I had was to have a tab on the top that would only show on a visitors first access to the site, then it would always show the top forum posts. I'm not sure that's possible, but it's not a requirement.
For the photo contest. I plan on either writing a custom module myself or pay someone to do it for me. Either way, there will be a winners module and that will be on the homepage and on the main photo contest page. Voila, I never have to touch the homepage again unless I want to do something special!!
Keep in mind module containers, fonts, colors, and the menu, are all still being worked on. They will all change quite a bit as I continue refining the look of the site. The layout itself however is pretty close to where it will end up with maybe some minor changes here and there.
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