Updated Home Page Design In Place

To Give The Home Page An Identity Of Its Own, Left And Right Columns Have Been Removed To Make Room For Main Section Graphics

This should spice things up a bit by getting rid of the side columns to clean up the page and make room for some graphics that incorporate photographic images for the four main sections of the site.

The site is pretty consistent throughout. I wanted to give the home page a little live using actual photos and help differentiate it a bit from the interior pages so I spent the last two days thinking about things (read: obsessing over it). The plan was to make better use of the slide show and graphics that originally appeared. But since everyone, and it really does seem to be EVERYONE, who uses this template incorporates the suggested slide show it was time to in a different direction.

We're about to pick up a new client at work and they suggested a design that models a few sites that had these panels that led you into the different sections of the site. Hell, I saw them and was on board. The first day of graphic design failed. The slideshow was still getting in the way, was way too big and the rounded corner effects of the links just weren't hitting it right. By the end of the (late) night I actually went back and restored my database from the morning to overwrite the changes I made. Filthy!

Tonight brought some success though. I used a pre-formatted column feature for the different sections of the site and toned down the buttons a bit. I was incorporating original graphics, but the site needed a more human touch so I created a frame that can house photos I'll be gathering for each panel. You might be seeing the placeholders for a few days so hang tight.

After that everything just fell into place. I continued to use the pre-formatted column items, added a few modules to the Front Page article, and everything kind of came together. I'm a bit on the fence about the middle section that displays mod, but I'm hoping that looks a bit better after some new Latest News articles get populated that aren't only one or two words long.

There's still much to do for the home page design, but it looks like I'll roll with this. We'll see if it sticks. I'm still putting off writing actual content, but this Alpha phase is getting tighter now.

Thanks,

Erik