This is something that I'm right home with so this is more of a for your information rather than having to solve anything technology related. However, I thought it would be good to have a page that I can comment/update on with what my thoughts are.
This encompasses a complete new build and design of the current website plus a few mandatory items for it plus what will make a seamless user experience across the website and community platform.
New State
- Complete new site design
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Non-negotiables
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Hero/Featured images within a post
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Excerpt used for both SEO and with Zapier for social on a post
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Clean typography (Bw Haas Grotesk)
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Examples
Examples of designs
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Discoverability: Enhanced discoverability is a must. Must provide contextual/related articles on each post
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Usability and Readability. Fonts, colors and organisation will be priority to ensure that the website is intuitive to navigate and easy to read.
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Impactful Imagery: Bold visuals and large-scale imagery is a priority
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Content Marketing Bits: Each post should have a subscribe component, author biography and optimised for ads/sponsors
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Contribution Page: “Make a Contribution” page, similar to this page
- Newsletter to replace Mailchimp
- Membership/Subscription for gated content, community etc.
- Comments I would prefer ~~Coral given the capability of the platform vs Cove~~. See Perspective API + Akismet. Cove to build out Perspective integration soon.
- Site search to use Algolia for internal search (unless there’s something better). This would play nicely with combining the forum search as well.
- Support graphic inserts (Advertisement) across certain parts of the homepage and articles/posts - eg. https://www.trizone.com.au/20210824/nicola-spirig-feels-right-at-home-at-challenge-davos/
- Community either Discourse, Circle.so - leaning towards Discourse at the moment however, I think there will need to be some UI adjustments as the standard themes all look very average.
Preferred stack
- Headless and static for security and performance - maybe use https://www.11ty.dev/. Is this possible with having a need for people logging in?
- SSO with Auth0 or similar. Part of the the driving factor is the ability to have a person signup once and be able to move across to other services seamlessly without the need to enter a new username/password all the while leveraging a familiar sign-up authentication method (Facebook, Twitter, Google etc.). I feel this is really critical for user success - the less friction the better.
- Leverage a decent CI/CD pipeline with GitHub or maybe only requires GitHub Actions for theme updates and container for Ghost core
Future
