PM from Mike

E

Eric the Red

Team HuskerBoard
Hey Eric,

 

Just food for thought. Really hope you dont mind.

 

 

HP is stepping it up big time with a fresh look and a much more user friendly format. IMO they recognize that they are losing members to mainly us.

 

We should step it up and have some contests with some HN reward. Also its been a while since we have had a banner change and that would freshen up our look too.

 

These are just my thoughts and I am in know way trying to overstep my bounds. They are evening the playing field. We should follow suit and step it up. Again Eric please understand that its just food for thought.

 

Thanks for reading,

Mike

 
Well, we should probably do something. They have that shiny newness about them that we don't have anymore. In Internet time our upgrade was ages ago.

 
I'll play devil's advocate and say we should stay the course we believe in, rather than react. Look at it this way: we're doing something right, and they're throwing darts around trying to replicate our success. Of course, I'll play devil's advocate to my devil's advocate and say the flip side to that is we have to be always adapting in order to succeed.

Another thing is with our recent update. I don't think it was "ages ago" in internet time; in fact, it wasn't far enough ago. With sites that have lots of users (Facebook, for example), they have to be really delicate about pushing changes on the users, especially big ones. Users are typically very resistant, the larger the change. So there's a slow period of rollout, from after all the decisions have been made - announcements, previews, feedback, "beta", and final launch.

Considering we've gone through a major 'look' overhaul just recently, if we want to do another, perhaps bigger change, it's certainly something that's not too late to discuss. But I do think a minimum 8 month timeline to rollout would be advised.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
I think I fall into zoogie's camp. Looking at their site, they're obviously trying to replicate HuskerBoard. But the appearance is not the issue - it's usability and content. I personally think that HuskerBoard has a cleaner look, and is easier to navigate. Absent some concrete ideas for changes, I'd be inclined to sit tight here.

Eric, you might want to ask Mike if he has any specific ideas or suggestions - what does he see that HuskerBoard can do?

The contest idea is good if we can think of something that will really capture the majority of users. We don't want to overdo it, but particularly during the off-season it's a great way to generate interest. A new banner might be a good idea as well if we can come up with something really new and interesting.

 
I don't like the layout of the HP forums (although eerily similar looking to ours), and I especially don't care for the HP main page. I like that we are much cleaner looking.

I am liking the idea of a news "box" or whatever, on the main page, that provides the latest and greatest husker news. I believe this has been brought up already. Our members provide a lot of research that we can use. Nexus for example, is constantly posting fresh news articles. We could take some of these threads, pull the headline, use it to post a link to the thread from the main page. This would provide users with a direct link to news items without browsing the various forums. This would also eliminate having to pull information from outside HB as the "news box" would simply be links to HB threads. The source links are usually posted by the thread starter.

Just a random idea that I came across. Feel free to shoot it down.

 
I'm pretty sure Nexus just has an RSS feed set up with a Huskers keyword. He then posts the articles.

IP Board has an RSS feature that we could easily use. Here's the LINK on how to set that up.

 
Let's not react right away. We always need to be on the look out for improving the board, but it seems they're just trying to keep up with the Jonses. We're the Joneses :)

 
zoogies said:
I'll play devil's advocate and say we should stay the course we believe in, rather than react. Look at it this way: we're doing something right, and they're throwing darts around trying to replicate our success. Of course, I'll play devil's advocate to my devil's advocate and say the flip side to that is we have to be always adapting in order to succeed.

Another thing is with our recent update. I don't think it was "ages ago" in internet time; in fact, it wasn't far enough ago. With sites that have lots of users (Facebook, for example), they have to be really delicate about pushing changes on the users, especially big ones. Users are typically very resistant, the larger the change. So there's a slow period of rollout, from after all the decisions have been made - announcements, previews, feedback, "beta", and final launch.

Considering we've gone through a major 'look' overhaul just recently, if we want to do another, perhaps bigger change, it's certainly something that's not too late to discuss. But I do think a minimum 8 month timeline to rollout would be advised.
Click to expand...

I think many of us are here with what zoog's is saying. Thanks for the response, your really doing a great job on th board.

But I would like to go back to something elliot said about possible creating another page away from message board. We have some other pages out there. I would like to create something that has the news, notes, stats and sh#t page. Just something for people to be able to reference. On that page we put links to the messgae board.

 
AR Husker Fan said:
I think I fall into zoogie's camp. Looking at their site, they're obviously trying to replicate HuskerBoard. But the appearance is not the issue - it's usability and content. I personally think that HuskerBoard has a cleaner look, and is easier to navigate. Absent some concrete ideas for changes, I'd be inclined to sit tight here.

Eric, you might want to ask Mike if he has any specific ideas or suggestions - what does he see that HuskerBoard can do?

The contest idea is good if we can think of something that will really capture the majority of users. We don't want to overdo it, but particularly during the off-season it's a great way to generate interest. A new banner might be a good idea as well if we can come up with something really new and interesting.
Click to expand...
I'm up for a new banner contest. I would really like to see something cutting edge.

 
Here's some insight from a few members. The link in the thread shows examples of scrolling news boxes.

I think this the next logical step for Huskerboard. When the time is right I don't know. IMO this is more useful than the status updates. I would, however, vote to keep the updates and add a news box.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
I like the idea, and it should be relatively easy to implement. Some thoughts/questions:

1. The easiest implementation would be more of a landscape/horizontal box at the top - probably below the HuskerNation banner. There are two downsides to placing it on the side bar I can see off the top of my head. First, if a user elects to kill or hide the side bar, he'll end up hiding the news feed. Second, incorporating it in the side bar will be tricky - both from a code standpoint and from a size/placement standpoint. We'd almost have to remove one of the boxes in the current side bar, I'm thinking. Right now, the current boxes extend (at least on my monitor) to about the bottom of the last form (Feedback) that non-Mod/Admins can see. If we don't remove one, we'll be extending the side panel beyond the Feedback forum; aesthetically, not sure that would look good.

2. We can certainly place the HTML file in a location accessible to all the Mods and Admins for updating - but a scrolling news feed is good only if it's updated regularly. If not, people will tend to ignore it. Can enough of us devote the time to it? For those that don't have HTML abilities, you can "feed" the information to those of us that do, and we can update. But it's still a labor-intensive process.

3. Speaking of information, what information would we put in there? To be honest, I never have really visited other Husker boards much (with the exception of a number of weeks we had to monitor the HPH board when they were trolling us - ugh), so I'm not sure what HuskerPedia put in their box.

 
Back
Top