Redesigning the Voting Community

[tjpeople]

Right now, I've spoken to david and there is a good chance I will be in possession of malcolminthemiddle.co.uk domain in the not too distant future.

I have a plan, something I've had for a while but want to go about creating with the help of the community now.

The basic idea is to group the Voting community site together. We currently have the gallery, episode guide and forums.

http://tjpeople.com/mitmbeta/ Now that is just a demo, nothing fancy but is my basic idea for the front page - when people go malcolminthemiddle.co.uk. The get presented with a banner at the top saying malcolm in the middle voting communtiy. then some tag line like "worlds biggest malcolm in the middle community"

Underneath are various links (as small images) to things such the forums, gallery, episode guide, media page (download font, theme tune, maybe episodes etc)

This will drive a huge new load of traffic to the forums and other site.

now currently www.mitm.tjpeople.com is 9th on google search (front page) and lower down on other major search sites. It will be replaced with the malcolminthemiddle..co.uk main page with links to things.

What do you guys think?
(remeber tjpeople.com/mitmbeta is just a mock up, the images used are just to show the idea)

[Amigo22]

Sounds like a good idea to me ;D The demo page looks cool. 8)

[yardgames]

I like it, TJ, it looks really neat. What's cool about this community is that so much of it is comprised of work that have been done by various members so I would love to see other people's suggestions, as well.

As your plans with the project move forward, let me know what, if anything, you want me to host. If you want the forums I can get you this DB and hopefully it won't go corrupt like our good old vB DB. It doesn't look like we're going to be able to get that data back in a functional form though, as you mentioned.

[tjpeople]

http://test.tjpeople.com/

right ive deveopled the idea a little.

now rember picture icons etc will be changed in just ussing stuf to give an idea.

i feel that a frame based system would be best. meansing you allways have that top menu bar and it mean people will be able to quickly flick to all sections.

there are ton of things to sort out, i was thinging of making the front page a blog style, then we can blog on news/update/features to both the site and MITM.

[yardgames]

I politely disagree about frames. They're old-fashioned and never work very well; in fact, the new version of IE has actually dropped some support for frames because they're no longer recognized as "standard." Personally, I liked the first design better.

[tjpeople]

yea i know, i dont really like frames either, i was thinking it might be a way to do the idea to have a constant theme.

So here is another idea.

I really like the blog as the mian page, becuase its easy to maintain (have multiple users with acess) and get news on the FRONT PAGE.

Then links to gallery, guide, forum, media, chat.

HOWEVER I would really like some standardisation in the theme. As in the same banner at the top of everything, so it ties together.

[reese35]

Sounds good. Maybe I could design the banner (since I designed it with the forums) because the test one looks too squished together. You get me?

[reese35]

Oh, and I was thinking, to make it a little more shorter, the banner could read MalcolmVC, then under it, it'd read Malcolm in the Middle Voting Community. The site could be malcolmvc.[whomever hosts the site].com, or vice versa.

[tjpeople]

Yea the banner is squashed, it was just an image i threw in its not gunna be the that one, so yes anyone could design the banner. But thats details at the moment we need to sort the format out first.

We should be able to get www.malcolminthemiddle.co.uk (im getting it off david soon i hope)

www.test.tjpeople.com/blog

If we had a blog style main page but it wouldnt look too bloggy as the front page then we can link off the menu bar to various things etc

This would IMO be better than just a plain bunch of images and links to other things.

[yardgames]

As much as I enjoy abbreviations and as much as it seems like I'm disagreeing with everyone here (;D) I think we should actually spell it out: Malcolm in the Middle Voting Community so that it's clear exactly what it is and so that it matches our domain.