Redesign Home Page

Hi guys,

For all your awesome designers on HBH that would like to contribute back to this fine community, heres your chance to be involved with redesigning the home page.

My design skills SUCK major balls (see Interviews page) .. so I'd like to have someone more skilled to get the homepage looking how it should be!

Obviously it has to stay in-keeping with the design, i.e using the theme bars / boxes etc.. but theres room to play around with layout, call to action images, huge usability improvements, etc etc

My initial thoughts on the homepage (your feedback/ideas welcome):

• RSS more prominent

• 6 HBH news items

• 6 Hacking/Security news items

• news pagination

• intro text

• space for the 480x60 add banner

• latest challenges

• latest code submissions

• latest articles

• latest forum posts

• latest features

• latest urban defacement

• more prominent "have you been hacked?" image/link

• "information link section" (is this site legal / what is hacking / etc)

• static/ticker feed of "latest completed challenges" i.e "mr_cheese completed basic 1 and was awarded 10 points!"

• maybe a super slick javascript featured slide box for 3 key areas of hbh (challenges, forum, articles)? .. see xrumerseo.com for an example (obvioulsy not as big!)

obviously thats a lot to fit on the home page… but theres a lot of space! and not everything HAS to go on there, whatever looks/feels the best.

all the coding etc will be done by me, most of which is already in place just need a design to attach it to.

if you're interested i'd love for you to PM me / post a mockup of your design. if i think it kicks ass, then we'll sort out some points and EM as a reward.

Thoughts, ideas etc welcome :)

Mr_Cheese wrote:

• space for the 480x60 banner

Not to be nitpicky, but the banner is a lot bigger than 480x60.

Also, I don't know how much work it would be to implement (probably work on samurai's part), but I'd like to see a "Who's in #hbh" list for the IRC on the main page as well.

• add banner

I havn't done any web apps integrating with IRC before, so i don't know if theres a method that doesn't require sockets, however i would be hesitant to add any feature on the home page that uses sockets due to server resources.

Mr_Cheese wrote: I havn't done any web apps integrating with IRC before, so i don't know if theres a method that doesn't require sockets, however i would be hesitant to add any feature on the home page that uses sockets due to server resources. Well you would probably just have a text file or something that gets updated periodically which the main page could read from.

if that method is possible then i'll certainly be adding it, would be quite a handy tool to have on the home page :)

The best solution(s), you probably know them already…

1. Set up a cron job to execute something to grab what ever it is to a file (somewhere) periodically.

2. (Could be done in PHP within the website code itself) Stat the file for the last modified date/time, if older than a periodic refresh time, reload it that once. Impacts heavily on the first page access after the refresh time, and adds a small overhead throughout unfortunately.

I would only be half useful programming wise but I know how it is, and it is better that you do that side yourself, wish I was good with graphics to help you!

I hope people come back with some good designs, because the content is there, at the most some of it may need a little tidying.

*I think the two things that might make the biggest difference to the site as a whole are:

> Colour/Font selection - so that fonts become a bit more "apparent", sometimes I have to look a little closer at the Navigation but it's all in a good logical order.

> Some added spacing on content - For example: slightly larger margins round the article space perhaps might make some things a little easier to read or reformat some chunks of text to paragraph tags with a single line spacing top and bottom of the paragraph, often when I've read something it almost all runs in to one unless the content has been separated with some ASCII art or code boxes.

An idea I would like to just throw out there:

The Search module is quite small and compact graphically. It could be made in to a block on the left/right hand side, failing that integrated in to the header in one corner?

Hope this helps! :)

Jim,

You did not just ask members to throw you free stuff ;D

spyware wrote: You did not just ask members to throw you free stuff ;D

Since we're mostly linux users, i guess we tend to think more on the community rather than in ourselves only ;P

• fix the annoying chrome css bug

I would love to see this happen :happy: Unfortunately, I figure that a lot of our design skills around here may be lacking. Typically, I've noticed programmers suck as designers and vice versa. Hopefully someone here isn't too bad, though.

Vector-fusion wrote: If we ( as the community ) do design the new home page. Will it be coded in HTML 5 ? Yeah, I support the use of HTML5 definitely.