Welcome To WebmasterWorld's New Home Page

[engine]

I'm delighted to say we have a new home page for you all today. Thank you Jim [webmasterworld.com] and the team for helping us bring this to fruition.

It's here, if you haven't already found it. [webmasterworld.com...]

The new home page will help you navigate WebmasterWorld much easier, and it shows you our most recent featured news and information posts, our hottest threads of the week, and our hottest threads trending for the month. These threads are hot because it's what WebmasterWorld members are talking about.

If you'd like to see more hot thread options, you'll see an option to click on Yesterday, or Today, This Week, and This Month.

We've also added a new Forums Index on that page to help you easily find your way around our forums and topics for news and discussion. That's a lot of great topics!

And there's more, too: You'll find we have featured a selection from the extensive toolkit of WebmasterWorld Free Tools. These featured tools include selected SEO tools, Social Tools, Webmaster Tools, and Miscellaneous Tools. The full selection of over 70 free tools is still on the menu at the top.

If you still want the previous WebmasterWorld home page, you can find it on the WebmasterWorld Classic Home Page here [webmasterworld.com], or by following the links on the site.

[heisje]

If it ain't broken, don't fix it.

[lawman]

Looks good.

[lucy24]

:: detour to see what OED can tell me about use of "easier" as an adverb ::

[longen]

I don't often like change but this one works for me, definitely easier to locate features.

[engine]

For those that don't want change the old home page, it's still there and linked. Follow the "WebmasterWorld Highlighted Posts" link on the new home page.

[Fotiman]

Looks good. But if you are going to the trouble of creating a new layout, why-oh-why are you still using long outdated coding practices, like using <font> tags (and STILL using tables for layout)? This would have been the perfect opportunity to use modern practices.

[lucy24]

<font> tags

Oh, say it ain't so :( After the nice change of shifting boring stuff from the left to the right where it belongs?

:: further detour to page source ::

But why? The CSS starts comfortably enough with "font-family" followed by plenty of "font-size" ...

It's a legacy thing, isn't it? The underlying source code is still the same; the content has just been differently arranged. So the php-or-whatever still has to be separately taught to say

<td class = "blahblah">

instead of

<font size="1" face="arial" color="#000000">

:: business with text editor ::

<table cellpadding="4" border="0" width="85%" height="99">
<table cellspacing="1" cellpadding="0" border="0" width="100%" height="100%">
<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" width="100%">
</table>
</table>
</table>
<table>
<table width="250">
</table>
<table width="250">
</table>
<table width="250">
</table>
<table width="250">
</table>
<table width="250">
</table>
<table width="250">
</table>
</table>

Oh, come on.

[Fotiman]

Oh, come on.

My thoughts exactly.

[incrediBILL]

But if you are going to the trouble of creating a new layout

It's not a completely new layout, it's the existing WebmasterWorld template with new content in the middle.

At least the new content uses CSS ;)

[blend27]

I don't think this is innovative at all.

There is a almost a qillion Links(+1) and perhaps a million user`s references that point to WebmasterWorld, as far as I know we are "here-here", and it is not based on ADS.

Really, Make the move!

p.s.

and for dudes sake, please take CF section from dev shed(scripts), it' it so out-f-dated.

[mcneely]

I kind of liked how it looked in 2005 but that's just me.

Busy would best describe the new front page - in sort of a SearchEngineLand kind of way ..

I'm nearly willing to bet that it all still views well in Internet Explorer 5 ...

[tangor]

Page looks okay... no problems there, just wonder why all the highlighted posts and links are to google ... oh, that's because more whining is done there than any other topic. If hot topic is how many posts, the look of Webmasterworld will be google topics (yeah, I know they are the largest!) but not all of us come here to read about G!

That's why my landing page for Webmasterworld is this: [webmasterworld.com...]

When I want to change forums I'll go to home page then.

[Fotiman]

When I want to change forums I'll go to home page then.

My home page is the Forum Index [webmasterworld.com] page, and I use a Chrome extension [chrome.google.com] that I wrote myself to group the forums that I care about (7 of them) at the top of the list.

[ChanandlerBong]

This is webmaster world. Now, let's get beyond the use of "webmaster" which is so 1998, it's the domain and you're stuck with it. You are here to represent the world of web dev and how it IS, not how it WAS.

I right click and FF has replaced "View Page Source" with "Visit Museum". How odd...so I click and then I understand.

<body bgcolor="#fafafa" link="#000000" vlink="#000000" text="#000000">

<center><table cellpadding="4" border="0" width="85%" height="99"><tr><td bgcolor="#e8e8f4" height="100%"><center><table cellspacing="1" cellpadding="0" border="0" width="100%" height="100%"><tr><td bgcolor="#FFFFFF" valign="middle"><center>

<font size="1" face="arial" color="#000000">recent posts</font></a>

Where are we? We're in an innocent pre-9/11 world. People are worried by what will happen with the Y2K bug. Will planes really fall out of the sky? J Lo and Ricky Martin dominate the charts. Will Ross and Rachel stop breaking up for god's sake! And now they're talking about making a tv show where people just live in a house with cameras, nobody's going to watch that!

This comment has been centered for your comfort.

[lucy24]

And the winner is...

:)

[tangor]

My home page is the Forum Index [webmasterworld.com] page, and I use a Chrome extension [chrome.google.com] that I wrote myself to group the forums that I care about (7 of them) at the top of the list.

That actually sounds like a neat new feature to add to WW user settings: click a tick to mark your favs and have those show first. That would be something I'd like to see.

[Fotiman]

That would be something I'd like to see.

Me too. Though I'd also like to see WebmasterWorld catch up with the times and use some modern practices.
The code for my Chrome extension is available freely [github.com] if anyone at WebmasterWorld wants to try incorporating it into the site (though it's about 3 and a half years old, and could probably be improved).

[edited by: engine at 8:28 am (utc) on Jun 16, 2014]
[edit reason] Fixed link [/edit]

[longen]

Surely what matters is not whether the underlying code is up to date but rather the quality of the content it displays.

[Fotiman]

In my opinion, both matter. Trying to view WebmasterWorld on a mobile phone is no fun, because I have to zoom way in to see the content. Also, as a site that is supposed to be talking about web development, it looses some of it's credibility when the site itself is using coding practices that are long outdated. The page weight is made heavier by all the tables and presentational tags like font and center.

[n0tSEO]

I like the new homepage, even though I haven't tried it on mobile yet. In any case, I *love* seeing uls and divs instead of tables in the code! :D Pretty sight.

[ken_b]

I'm curious about what percentage of active registered members enter via the home page?

For me once I log-in in the morning it's the most often active threads page.

I can't recall the last time I entered through the home page Unless I'm using my tablet on public wifi (not logged-in).
.

[brotherhood of LAN]

I'm the same ken_b, mostly "recent posts" and occasionally the home page to see what other people are talking/interested about. The hot topics helps on that angle.

[lucy24]

For me once I log-in in the morning it's the most often active threads page.

Same here. The page I've got bookmarked is the Forums-- not even Recent Posts, though I could save myself a click by going there directly. This applies to other forums I've been active on too. I never even look at the official front page ... unless there's some widely publicized change that everyone is exhorted to look at ;)

[engine]

Thanks for all the input, both good and bad. :)

Whether you used the old home page or not, this new page gives members added capability they didn't have previously. Some may even visit the new home page now that there's focussed content, and more content discoverable.

You can't hold it against us for trying to make a tweak to help. :)

[tangor]

Nothing wrong in making tweaks, just know that users will use the forums the way they like, not what's on the front page. :)

Most of the time I have no interest in many of the forumns (perl/php social, etc.) so the active posts (recent) works great... and also works better when in "conversation" with others on a specific topic. There are, however, some other forums that I check about once a month because the activity is pretty low, and that's when I'll hit either the forum index or the home page. To make that "better" for "me" would be to have the forum index page with an option to "pick your favs" so that the forums I am most interested in are at the top, ie, "pin" those forums ahead of the others.