Jul
01

Landscaping Connections forum beta testers

Calling all people who enjoy breaking things! Never had a chance to register that elusive username that someone always seemed to nab before you?

Now you can! My latest web project, another web forum, needs beta testers. So come create an account and try to break as many functions as you can, by using the old totally-unexpected-user-behaviour pattern. I’ll even give you a cookie (oh god, that was a terrible pun). Judging by the number of comments on this site, I don’t expect to get inundated but one or two people would work well.

It’s affiliated the main site, Landscaping Connections (that I didn’t build but have had the pleasure of fixing bugs in), to include a forum for people to talk about landscaping-related design and things. The backend is the wonderful, lightweight bbpress (made by the same team that created Wordpress). But bbpress is still essentially beta and I’ve heavily modified the frontend (and some of the functions and redirects) - so I’m hoping everything is rock solid. Next goal is to populate it since no-one wants to be the first person at the party…think I’ll leave that to someone else.

And now for something completely different…
I was browsing Slideshare the other day and found some really interesting presentations on there. Here’s two of them, check ‘em out:

Light Up Your Brand - A great presentation on effective advertising, marketing products and the web’s strengths in word-of-mouth and viral. Ah, aren’t human behaviours so predictable.
7 Reasons why most conversations are a waste of time - Satirical but so true. Most people are so busy talking they don’t ever listen. So on that note, I’ll let you find out on your own.

Tags: bbpress, design, forum, landscaping, slides

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4 Comments...

Leon

18th July, 2008

Hey Sean

I was just passing by and found this post… I love the background pattern you’re using on landscaping connections forum! The frog looks a little bit washed out (like you’ve got opacity=70% set). Otherwise very nice and clean. But -1 for adwords they’re not flowing too well into the design.. also, it would be cool if you could place an onclick to the in the main forum categories.. currently it looks like you can (with the :hover effect) but you can only click the link. Just my 2 cents. catch you later. ciao.

Leon

18th July, 2008

…place an onclick to the (TR markup) in the main forum categories…

(the code got stripped)

Sean

19th July, 2008

I know, I hate adwords too! They’re just a placeholder image until I can figure out a better place to put them. Removed now.

The faded, watermark frog was sorta intensional, as with the lock and magnifying glass (I didn’t want to draw too much attention to the images). Do you think it would look better at full opacity?

RE:Clicking anywhere on the category line. This should direct you to the category (linking the whole TR with a bit of javascript: window.location=$(this).find(”.numlink a”).attr(”href”); then e.stopPropagation() so can still click any other link on that row. This means it only works with javascript turned on…)

Thanks for the comments, Leon. I appreciate your imput.

Leon

24th July, 2008

Hey Sean - looks better without the adwords (i think i meant adsense actually, but you knew what i was talking about) … you can actually be tricky and style adsense a fair bit to fit in with your site design..

Re: frog - Personally I think bring it back to full colour - but instead of fading the edges close to the frog, I would fade them over a larger space… making the fade from background to the frog much softer… But tbh, I’m now sitting on the fence if that would work, as I like the faded images on the lock and magnifying glass… maybe the solutions is to draw a vector frog to go with the other graphics style?

The onclick javascript applied to the TR works well much better from a usability aspect! nice work there.