Forum:New main page proposal
I'd like to propose that we revise the main page. The move to Fluid Layout has caused some weird issues to occur with the page depending on the width used to view it. Some of the more glaring problems have been corrected (as have other problems in the wiki's theme) but the Main Page still looks sub-par, especially on higher-resolution monitors. I've spent the past couple days testing and tweaking a mainpage design, and I'm ready to debut it here and propose that it be adopted. The design is visible here.
A few items of note regarding that draft mainpage. Since it exists off The Sims Wiki, there are a lot of redlinks and missing images. I made sure to upload and add any images that would affect the ultimate appearance of the page. The only images still missing, to my knowledge, are the icons found on the header bars. Since no headers are being added, the same images we currently use will be reused.
Notably, the proposed version is lacking a few things that our current mainpage has. Specifically, the new mainpage design does not have a slider gallery or "news from thesims3.com" section. The removal of the slider is for purely aesthetic reasons; unfortunately, the slider gallery looks bad when viewed on high-resolution displays due to the excess empty space on either side of it. I tried finding alternatives to the slider gallery but none panned out so I chose to simply remove it. We can make use of Sims News blogs to highlight new features, as we currently do already, so the slider is pretty much redundant as it is. I also pulled the TS3.com news section, for similar redundancy reasons - much of what appears there is also announced in the Weekly News or else in Sims News blogs.
Ultimately, the new design was created with variable width in mind. Unlike the current main page, features on the proposed page were selected and organized based on how they appear together, with the ultimate goal being to ensure that the page looks presentable at maximum and minimum widths, and at all points in between. More essential or popular features, like the About blurb and the Battles, were moved from the right to the left column, and less necessary or redundant items were moved to the right column. This is because the right column is pushed below the left column when viewed on small displays or mobile displays. This reorganization ensures that the most important content appears near the top of the left column.
So, with all that in mind, I'd like to propose that we adopt this proposed main page design for The Sims Wiki. Thoughts? -- LostInRiverview talk ~ blog 06:52, December 8, 2013 (UTC)