Author Topic: NSF News Site Redesign Update (WORK IN PROGRESS) - September 2017  (Read 33202 times)

Offline Chris Bergin

Here's the latest development screenshots from the ongoing Work In Progress on the news site revamp, led by Mark. The goal is to keep familiarity, but to totally update functionality and appearance.

Feedback is welcomed and encouraged, noting it is still being worked and refined. :)

Desktop screenshots from the development:

Note the article view is an example (thus not a real article) and an actual article will have specific sizing and layout....but as WIP....I know most of you don't like the current version of images in articles ;) Click or open in new window to see it in full view.
« Last Edit: 09/13/2017 09:12 pm by Chris Bergin »
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Offline Chris Bergin

A screenshot from the mobile news site, still WIP as above.
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Online gongora

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Looks nice overall.  The spacing of stuff in the Active Discussions area seems a bit off.  Are there other sub-sections farther down the page under "SpaceX"?

Offline NSF Webmaster

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Looks nice overall.  The spacing of stuff in the Active Discussions area seems a bit off.  Are there other sub-sections farther down the page under "SpaceX"?

The 'Active Discussions' list is still being worked on (alignment,padding) so yes :)

The other content/sections are listed below the SpaceX section but those can rotate depending on the section we want to highlight. The list of 'Latest Articles' as present on the current site is also present below the featured sections


Offline Chris Bergin

Added a fourth slide to the opening post.

Note the article view is an example (thus not a real article) and an actual article will have specific sizing and layout....but as WIP....I know most of you don't like the current version of images in articles ;) Click or open in new window to see it in full view.
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Offline pippin

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A screenshot from the mobile news site, still WIP as above.
Would tablet/iPad be a mobile layout or use the desktop layout?

Offline NSF Webmaster

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Would tablet/iPad be a mobile layout or use the desktop layout?

tablet friendly :)


Offline pippin

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Niiiice!

Offline Andy DC

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Been a long time coming, but looks cool especially as a working progress! Looks like articles allow for video and various content additions with the text not wrapped around, which is awesome.

Will the forum modify to this format, like the current site does with the header?

Great work!

Offline NSF Webmaster

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Will the forum modify to this format, like the current site does with the header?

Great work!


Thanks! Focus is on the news site first, the forum will follow afterwards but yes the forum will also adopt this design/style

Offline RichAM

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Looks really great and clean. I know there will be more things added, but it'll still look bright and clean. I wonder what the other items to add can be, like if there's anything people have seen on other news sites that would be cool to this site? Like I wonder if we could have a next launch in the top bar of the news site, it could be fed off the forum launch calendar?

Articles are going to look so much better with this new site.

Offline KEdward5

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Already looking awesome even as work-in-progress! Can imagine some of Nathan's renders as article lead images making it look even more awesome.

Offline Coastal Ron

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Not sure what your goals are with the redesign besides updating the look of the site (which does like more modern) - is anything planned to be done on the SEO side of the house?

For instance, do you plan to use Schema.org tags or other SEO markup systems?
If we don't continuously lower the cost to access space, how are we ever going to afford to expand humanity out into space?

Offline pippin

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The one thing I’m really missing on the current site WRT articles is being able to click images to show them full window/full screen sized.

Offline NSF Webmaster

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The one thing I’m really missing on the current site WRT articles is being able to click images to show them full window/full screen sized.

Consider that fixed

Offline NSF Webmaster

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Not sure what your goals are with the redesign besides updating the look of the site (which does like more modern) - is anything planned to be done on the SEO side of the house?

For instance, do you plan to use Schema.org tags or other SEO markup systems?

SEO optimalization is definately on the radar, but first we'd like to finalize the design. Thanks for the suggestion !

Offline SteveSpace

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So good! New site, but still feels like NSF. What else are you currently thinking of adding to the news site? Seems like there's plenty of room for more cowbell! ;D

Offline TerryNaylor

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Definitely the cleanest appearance of a site I've seen, knowing there's more to come. I was going to say it's too clean and could use more things, but it's the general design, so that's great.

Also like the idea of a launch alert style clock/counter/widget on the front of site. There's lots of App people on here who can add things, but yeah, not too many things.

Superb work.

Offline incoming

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Looks great. 

One of the unique and valuable assets this site has vs other news sites is the healthy and active forums. I've always thought there could be a little better integration between the two, while also maintaining the editorial separation between curated content and community content.

Two suggestions to take or leave -  Having the active topics area helps, and of course it's helpful when articles link to L2 content.  But how hard would it be to have a contextual active topics window when you open an article?  That way, when you open an article and see something you want to discuss, you can see if there are active threads you want to join on the topic already.

Second, and along the same lines, I think it would be good to have a launch calendar that's kept updated by some combination of the mods and the community, again with links to relevant discussion threads.  SpaceX launches are particularly hard to pin down, and it takes a while to dig through the forums to try to figure out what's happening when, what may move, etc.  I think all of the information is here already, it just takes an awfully long time to dig through and find. 


Offline NSF Webmaster

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Looks great. 

...


Thanks! And thank you for your suggestions. When the news part of the side is done we'll shift our attention to the forum. As of now, the current forum software is not very equipped to integrate with other systems in a '2017ish way' so we need to take care of that first. More integration between articles and forum discussions (as a concept) is already on the roadmap but the way we are going to make it work is still to be determined .

Mark

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