Wow! Just checked in and found a lot of very helpful opinions and ideas about the message board. This is what we need to fine tune things!
The biggest "groan" is the number of messages being displayed on the board, so I've changed this (for the moment) to 7 rather than 20. You may think I was out of my mind displaying 20, and you might be right! -- but sometimes messages can be short one-liners and if you have seven of those in a row then it would look pretty pitiful. But I agree 20 of the current chunky posts is way too many. It's very easy to change though, so we'll go with 7 for now and see how it goes.
I have 15 messages displayed on my own site; I thought it was 20, but I remembered wrong. Plus, my own content area is wider that the EBS one, and this makes a big difference in the display. (In fact, widening the content area is something I'd like to do in the future, if we can.)
The second biggest "groan" was that the message board should be placed after the forum links. Actually I had a hard time deciding about that when I first put the MB up, so this doesn't surprise me. So I've swapped them around. In fact, those using the forum links will find them higher up than they were before, because the old News section is now gone.
There was a mention about adding a link to see the older messages. Actually the old messages are stored on the Post-a-Message page -- it's just that in these early days of just a few messages, there's no point having a link saying "see more messages" when in fact there aren't any extra! But now that we have a limit of 7 on the home page, and a total of 17 messages so far (therefore 10 in the "archives"), you'll see that there's a link at the foot of the home page saying "see more messages and post one of your own." (I'll have to add a restriction to those in the archives sometime too. Currently my own site shows 15 on the home page, 50 on the Post-a-Message page, and an extra option to display ALL messages if you really want to -- all 1198 of them!)
Displaying the messages in reverse date order is a must, I'm afraid. It's easy to change the order, but it doesn't make much sense for people to have to scroll to the bottom to see if there are any new ones, while meanwhile the top-most, older messages scroll off the top! There's a big difference between a paginated system (like these forums) and a simple one-page "scrolling" system (where the latest show at the top of the page and the older ones drop off the bottom).
Oh, just a quick clarification on the subject of hits. The "hits" statistic for a website is pretty worthless in terms of counting visitors. As Tony knows, it's the "visits" that matter. Yes, March has seen 1,000 visits per day, on target for 30,000 visits this month. As for "hits," we've had 26,272
per day in March, or 735,641 this month so far. Oh, if only that were the number of unique visitors! But no, hits are basically a count of elements on each page that loads. If a page has five images on it, then it might only be one
visit but six
hits (including the page file itself). The nice masthead image at the top of this site is hit every single time you browse from page to page. Look at the smilies to the right when you post a message here -- there are 22 of them! They're only small, but that's 22 hits, plus the page, plus the masthead image at the top, plus other small images dotted about the page... So you can see that hits add up pretty quickly! I've had many excited clients saying "I've had half a million hits this month!" ...it's a shame to tell them, "Yes, but only about 23 visitors."
What else? Nigel mentioned that my site (EB.net) can go a couple of days without messages being approved, and he's right, so it's very nice that the one on this site is being looked after so promptly by Anita and Tony. I'm trying to keep on top of my own message board, as I know it must be frustrating to post something and then wait a couple of days for me to check it! I have a plan formulating to deal with this...
Okay, that's all for now. Keep the suggestions rolling in! It's easy to tweak things, so don't be afraid to put in your votes. After I read three or four posts in this thread saying one thing, that was enough to do something about it. See, we're not living in a dictatorship here!
There may well be a large silent majority out there who don't want the latest forum posts to dominate the Home Page!! We might end up with a much smaller tidier Home Page if there were simply quick pictorial links to both. In theory LS's earlier idea of a Questionnaire sounds good - in practice however, few people can be bothered to fill them in, which is why you often see free gifts offered for those that do.
