A few tweaks to the eBrandon front page
2/1/2017 at 9:09 AM
As operator of eBrandon for almost 12 years I find it important to every once in a while take a step back, look at how the site has grown and evolved, take special note of what people use the site for the most and to focus navigation on those features to stay with the times. In some ways I guess you could say its inspired by the approach used by a much larger tech company like Google or Apple in the sense that you try different experimental supporting products and features, put more time and resources into what sticks and put less into what doesn’t.
eBrandon has always been built around the main pillars of the classifieds as well as an ever evolving archive of more than a decade worth of searchable questions, answers and local discussion in the forums. When so many folks are here for those features you have an opportunity to fill other needs and also present useful regularly updated sections for Weather, News, Events, Obituaries and more.
What hasn't gotten as much recognition is that so many categories within the classifieds have taken on a life of their own to the point where they are basically "sites within the site" all by themselves. Case in point, if you look at site stats there are more than 20 classified categories that all by themselves get more than 25,000 pageviews in a month. As a developer of countless business and sports websites in a past life I know that there are a lot of entire sites that consider it a success to have that much traffic themselves over several months.
With that in mind two of the categories that on average have ads that get viewed even more than all others and have truly taken on a life of their own are Jobs and Homes for Sale. To make them a little easier to access and keep up to date with you will now find links into recent postings in these sections directly on the front page. These can now be found in the centre column below the front page classified feature ad box.
To make room, content boxes have been phased out from the front page for two sections that stats show simply aren’t an important part of the average eBrandon user's experience that would justify valuable front page space: Videos and Blogs. The front page Opinion Poll has also proven to be redundant (you may have heard we have lots of opinion in the forums
) and pretty tough to regularly have engaging multiple choice questions for and so has been taken out. Forums are simply a better mechanism to get opinion in most cases. Things are still setup to allow a poll question to be added in rare cases where it's useful but there's no sense in putting boring a limiting multiple choice question up every week or leaving the same question up for weeks on end when all of the feedback you could ever ask for can come from questions asked by fellow members in the discussion forums.
At the same time, we've had links to a few "legacy" items in the main site menu that served their purpose as secondary site ventures or experiments in the past but simply don't today justify inclusion in the main menu as core site features. These i:nclude Wishes (which led to a lot of great things during its day but just has too much overlap between the classifieds and forums to justify its long term inclusion), Shopping (there are better places to find flyers) and Video (YouTube does such a great job as a video sharing service, there isn't a need for a local one). For those that would like to take a walk down memory lane, links to these sections are still i:ncluded at the bottom of the page. Now added to the main menu is a link to the Jobs classified category along with greater priority to the Homes link…. reflecting their "site within the site" status and making it that much easier for folks to go straight to them.
Thanks to all that make eBrandon what it is by relying on it for the services it's built to offer the community and for helping with feedback on features…. its those suggestions above all else that have evolved the site to where it is today. If you ever have a thought on a current or future feature don’t hesitate to drop me a note through the Contact link at the bottom of any page!