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The 9rules Homepage Challenge

The 9rules Team has been having mini-meetings with regards to the direction we should take the 9rules Network homepage. We love the current homepage, but once I explain the problem you will see that it has to change. We think we came up with a pretty good solution and Mike and Colin are working hard at getting it done, however with me being the curious type I would love to hear what you think could be done with the page.

The Problem

The current homepage works well with a limited number of sites and only one language, but our group of English sites continues to grow and soon we are announcing Spanish sites into the network. We don’t want a list of 100 sites (the list is too big already) and we want the user of the homepage to have an option of whether they want English only, Spanish only or a mix.

Your ideas also have to keep in mind that new languages will be introduced in the future and more and more sites are jumping on board. Also giving everyone equal face time on the homepage is very important.

Hopefully you can see the challenge this presents, but it’s a fun challenge indeed. If you had to do what we are doing how would you go about it? Our solution was to stop looking at the page as a homepage and more of a web application.

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Published by Scrivs on September 7, 2005 in 9rules • Did you like it? Subscribe! Or Submit it to Blogosphere News!

18 people says things!

  1. Implement a tag-based search similiar to del.icio.us? Of course that doesn’t really solve the contract promise / issue of giving everyone equal time on the homepage.

    By Mark on September 7, 2005 3:06 pm

  2. An idea would be to allow people to sign up and login - and their account would display a customized version of what the main site does well for smaller number of sites.

    Another idea would be to make the main page the introduction to the “9rules’ concept and network, and then have a page that goes to an index, probably best organized by language - and then have some sort of nifty sidebar that shows what sites have been updated - maybe a ‘Recently Posted on the Network’ with options to select an language or do a mix of everything.

    Also would be to have a randomness algorithm that selects ‘new’ posts from the network and displays them on the front page. Then somewhere you could have a ‘notable posts’ type entry - where moderators or cool people or whoever you like can suggest a post to show up. Sort of a ‘link blog’ for the 9rules network.

    Another idea would be to group all the ‘design’ sites together into their own little subcategory , however classifying what exactly a site is about and placing it into a category is a sticky situation.

    In any case, I’m sure you’ll figure something completly mind blowingly awesome solution to your challenge. Good luck!

    By Daniel Nicolas on September 7, 2005 3:12 pm

  3. Eerie how amazingly close both of you are.

    By Scrivs on September 7, 2005 3:23 pm

  4. Yeah, I bet you could categorize them.

    By Glen C. on September 7, 2005 3:26 pm

  5. How about a “tab based” navigation on the main page?

    Right now you have one for latest entries, another for the blog and so on…

    The resulting page could be something like:

    1. Latest entries in the network (every lang)
    2. Latest in english
    3. Latest in spanish
    4. Network Blog
    5. Network members (categorized)

    With a cookie you could have the main page remember the last tab the user checked and keep it in the front the next time he visits the site.

    Also you could add a “favorites” section… this is a little more complicated but can be accomplished with a) user accounts or b) with cookies.

    I think that macagent.com does something similar without the need to login.

    By Moises Kirsch on September 7, 2005 3:39 pm

  6. Really enjoying the redesign.

    My 2cents:
    I think a login-less (like 37signals has been mentioning a while back, no need for all of us to remember *another* password) option for blogs you want to watch.

    As a default, the most viewed/commented (if that is within your realm at this point) ordered by time (filter by language) posts from your memebers. Essentially a digg.com idea, only views being diggs. It will scale, and support any languages (although non-english would never likely take top spots).

    I’m sure you’ll knock it out of the park

    By JohnO on September 7, 2005 3:49 pm

  7. Maybe the same now but a hover menu that expands for changing langauges.

    By Zach Inglis on September 7, 2005 4:05 pm

  8. Picture tabed categories, default with small screen shots of maybe 8 slotted sites (each site gets their equal slice of exposure), each category has a set of 8 screen shots. This would almost have a sort of CSS Vault kinda feel. Of course, with each category would be a link to list all sites. What would be real slick would be some kind of dynamic screen shot script that updates the screen shots every post. Don’t know if that’s possible.

    So yea, there’s my two cents. Oh, make the language selection OBVIOUS.

    By Jason Marble on September 7, 2005 5:00 pm

  9. Just a thought - if you’re planning to implement a login system of sorts, don’t bother with a username or password. As mentioned on Signal vs Noise a little while ago, why not experiment with the concept of a special URL for people to bookmark (or remember) to access their customized page.

    What i’d love to see is a really fleshed out forums system. 9rules already has the traffic and sense of community needed to foster an active forums system - why not up the ante and do something really special?

    By Jake Tracey on September 7, 2005 8:35 pm

  10. I would take into consideration the possibility of more languages. Future compatibility will most likely be key. Consider a relational db to store language relationships. This would also take care of the issue of bilingual websites…this way a website won’t hold the crutch of only having one language.

    By Dustin Diaz on September 7, 2005 8:59 pm

  11. Jake: Not quite sure where you are going with that, care to elaborate a bit more?

    By Scrivs on September 7, 2005 9:06 pm

  12. Oh, this is a nice change indeed. But if I may say, the comment number is too big. At first I thought it was the entry date. And I think maybe it should be the entry date. Oh and one more thing. The comment list on the right panel while it’s nice but also rather annoying because when I read your entry until the end, I have to scroll up again to see the #1 comment. But this is only my opinion and the overall design is great.

    By Eric on September 8, 2005 1:20 am

  13. I would reckon you need one space which shows a sample of everything under the 9rules banner. This may possibly be filtered by language(s); set in some kind of user prefs (cookie based or logged in?) because spanish sites are probably not much use if you only speak english.

    Then I would show an additional section of a limited number of sites filtered by categorised tags (relevant to the sites content) as defined by the user (again either cookie based or by log-in).

    This gives the user the best of both worlds, you get a taste of everything 9 rules has to offer plus your own customised selection.

    Personally I would think about the cookie based system because there is no need to worry about login. The only concern then is user-agents with cookies off or restricted.

    By Stuart Colville on September 8, 2005 6:28 am

  14. You must look Home page an introduction page rather than a index. Not so much blog link but some interesting info for first timers.Then links to your real indexes.

    By Kobayashi on September 8, 2005 9:29 am

  15. Well, I have to advocate the app-less (a unique, customized URL) approach as others have before me since I really don’t want to remember yet another login and password. So, as a user, I could follow my unique URL to a stripped down portal (so to speak) where I could choose from perhaps pre-defined blocks of information related to the network. For example, I could choose to see a network block of info that would show the last x number of entries to the 9rules blog, maybe a block that shows the latest 9rules English (or Spanish) member updates in a specific category, or a block showing the most active discussions happening on 9rules member blogs.

    This would all, of course, be organized in a lovely Rundle-ific interface.

    By Nicole on September 8, 2005 12:28 pm

  16. Forget about tabs, you could really use tags (not necessarily tagged by users) and nested panels, just like that del.icio.us director experiment http://johnvey.com/features/deliciousdirector/

    Well, in that case you’ll need ajax.

    By sosa on September 8, 2005 5:33 pm

  17. What you need is most likely a dynamic categorization structure, something like what I made here: http://bloghi.com/dir

    By Calin on September 9, 2005 4:08 am

  18. One thought…

    What about categorizing and tagging everything. Then the user could create an “ala carte” portal page by creating a tag chain… “Hmmm, today I would like to see Spanish + Cultural + Women” or “How about English + Technology + etc etc”. It could even be drag-n-drop based like reordering todo’s in Backpack (not just for AJAX sack though), all the tags in a list on one side of the page with a hot area on the right. Drag your tags into the window to build your custom information workflow. Kinda like Automator or Mail Rules on OS X.

    Then they would get a version of their home page that could look like the current one, along with some kinda save or cookie feature that would store the chain until a new one was selected. Forget the whole login thing if you can.

    Then for the main 9Rules homepage, you could have a weighted display (based on popularity, traffic, etc) or a random display (like suggested above) in order to insure fair airtime.

    Can’t wait to see what comes out of this…

    By John Peele on September 9, 2005 4:44 pm

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