@ed: “I’m considering treating the blog more like a notice board “
That makes sense to me:
- it’s the first thing a visitor sees, and therefore the best place to introduce the site to new visitors
- responding to a blog post currently has limited visibility (especially as responding to a post on page 3 of the blog does not bump the post to page 1)
- if a blog/noticeboard post invites a response (eg the existing blog “Would you get naked in front of your friends?”) , it would be better to duplicate the blog post as the opening post of a similarly named forum post. The noticeboard version should then end with a link to the forum page where users can read existing responses or answer the question.
- maybe some of the panels in the rightmost column should also become “notices”. The problem here is that in the mobile view, that column does not show up until after all the blog posts have been shown. So Latest Forum Activity in the current layout is unlikely to be seen by most mobile users that do not read to the very end of the blog. The display order in mobile view is horizontal, ignoring the activity column, then the next row, and finally the activity column. But if those panels could become blog/noticeboard posts the panels could be promoted to better positions in mobile view. For example:
- Welcome to Naked Experiment
- Quick Guide to our Community
- Latest Forum Activity
- Would you get Naked in front of your Friends
- Who’s Online
- Get Age Verified (with a description about the benefits)
- etc