Your thoughts please! How can we improve...

I would really appreciate hearing your feedback and thoughts about the look, layout & functionality of Fauna. Nothing in life is perfect, and therefore there is always room for potential updates, changes and advances to anything, including ourselves. From what you have seen here on Fauna and around the web else where, what are some suggestions you could offer up for potential changes here? Some changes might be incredibly hard to do, but others might be simple alterations that could have huge impact.

It would be nice at the end of thread if we could condense our thoughts to perhaps 10 main actionable suggestions. We are not privy to the programming costs associated with each suggestion, so it is not like they would all happen, but perhaps there are a couple in the list that could really make some affordable impact. Fauna has a huge variety of wonderful options, so this isn't a slam Fauna thread. If you offer a criticism, then please at least offer a helpful suggestion along with it. P-L-E-A-S-E, lets hear your thoughts!

ex. "I would like to see if we could add X feature here that this site has"
ex. "I think if we adjusted X feature already here and had it do this..."
ex. "This function always confuses me, could I suggest this instead"

There are no right or wrong suggestions, they are your personal thoughts, so go ahead and offer them up!

I'll start us off: What if we were to move the "Auctions" into the classifieds sections instead of having their own separate forum. Rather then divide viewers into multiple areas lets condense them to one and strengthen both. The separate area for auctions was given a fair chance to thrive by itself, lets now try it combined with classifieds. We could simply ad an "auction" drop down to the prefix tabs.

I do have one minor suggestion. When you click the Faunaclassifieds logo, it takes you to the classifieds home page instead of the splash page with the new posts information. I have no way of actually getting back to the splash page without actually retyping in the url. There is a hotlink for the classifieds and forum sections on the left side of the page already, but none for the splash page. Is this something that is fixable?

Originally Posted by Robert Walker

There are no right or wrong suggestions, they are your personal thoughts, so go ahead and offer them up!

I'll start us off: What if we were to move the "Auctions" into the classifieds sections instead of having their own separate forum. Rather then divide viewers into multiple areas lets condense them to one and strengthen both. The separate area for auctions was given a fair chance to thrive by itself, lets now try it combined with classifieds. We could simply ad an "auction" drop down to the prefix tabs.

The reason the auctions were put into a different section is because the regular classifieds sections have "anti-bumping" custom code in place, which would be incompatible with any ad designed to be treated as an auction style sale.

Rich, you for sure will know 100x better than the rest of us the ins and outs behind the scenes reasonings. I know there will be some things that just won't work, cost vs. benefit, desire vs. code limitations.

This may be a dead issue, but if some day a work around presented itself, it would be a suggestion.

Originally Posted by snowgyre

I do have one minor suggestion. When you click the Faunaclassifieds logo, it takes you to the classifieds home page instead of the splash page with the new posts information. I have no way of actually getting back to the splash page without actually retyping in the url. There is a hotlink for the classifieds and forum sections on the left side of the page already, but none for the splash page. Is this something that is fixable?

Splash page?
I use my control panel as my bookmark for this site, and have for years; so I'm not sure what you're calling the splash page...or what it offers that would make you want to go back to it once you're here.

Edited to add:
I think you're talking about the home page (the page you get when accessing via "faunaclassifieds.com"). I see that the link to the forums home page takes you to the forum map (the index page)

Originally Posted by snowgyre

I do have one minor suggestion. When you click the Faunaclassifieds logo, it takes you to the classifieds home page instead of the splash page with the new posts information. I have no way of actually getting back to the splash page without actually retyping in the url. There is a hotlink for the classifieds and forum sections on the left side of the page already, but none for the splash page. Is this something that is fixable?

If you are talking about the graphics logo in the upper left hand corner of the screen, when I click it it goes to the front page of the forum -> http://www.faunaclassifieds.com/forums/index.php? I believe this is where most people would prefer the entry point when looking for a "home" button.

Part of the reason for the auctions being separate was because when people started wanting that feature again, the classifieds were closed to posts by registered members...which meant that participating in auctions would have been limited to contributing members, OR that sellers would have to accept PM'd bids by registered members & be vigilant about updating the ad with the current high bid (which would have created all sorts of problems).

The splash page/screen is the primary/"front" page. The one that the following link takes you to:
http://www.faunaclassifieds.com.

The forums home page is, of course, the following:
http://www.faunaclassifieds.com/forums/index.php.

I would not mind it if clicking on the logo would take you to the splash page/screen.
However, I would hate it if all FC links (located near the top of all pages) took you to the Splash page. That would be a pain since you would constantly have to take an extra step to get back to the forums home page (where I prefer to be).

The "splash page" -> http://www.faunaclassifieds.com is really considered as the entry point from someone just finding the site for the first time, in my opinion. Once someone gets into the forums main page itself, I believe that they will tend to stay there and really have little reason to go back to the splash page at all. Realistically, the forums main page IS FaunClassifieds.

But maybe I'm wrong. So tell me why anyone would want to go back to the splash page after finding the forum main page. I would have to say that I NEVER go to that page myself unless I specifically want to check the Site Sponsors section, which seems to only work on one browser I use on alternate Tuesdays.