As some of you know, the main goal of WC2K7 was to rebuild the backend of the site to be more robust and much faster.  The actual look of the site was basically the existing site with a new skin.

So the next step is to start comign up with how we would like the pages to work.  We would like to get your input on some of this.

Below is a diagram of the home page:

So the top would continue to have the logo and the button bar (exept forums changed to community but we'll get more to that later).

But rather than giant news items spread out on the site, the news items would intead focus on displaying just the headling and a description with the user clicking on the link if they're interested. This would free up room to display more things.

Under that would be highlighted articles.  We would probably merge posts and articles to be the same thing with user ratings causing them to float to the top (so questions for support woudl stick in the help area whereas someone writing about skinnign woudl likely float up).

Over on the right we would use the new space to display more things. The boxes represent thumbnails. How many woudl be displayed depends on the resolution the user is viewing the site with.

But youw oudl get a good run-down at a galnce of what's been going on on the site.

At the bottom, The Popular Galleries woudl be displayed like you see keywords on some sites. It woudl be based on the popularity of the given gallery rather than WinCustomize choosing (annoiting) which galleries are to be displayed.

The Gallery page (gallery.wincustomize.com) woudl instead become the place where users would browse through the galleries in detail which we'll get to in one of the next posts on this subject.

My feeling is that this is a cleaner, more effective way to view the home page than what we currently have.

Thoughts?