CUNY Academic Commons

Hi Scott, thanks for setting this up. Maybe it would be good to have a tagline and a couple of category/archives links, just to give people a little introduction and a way to dive in from the homepage. And the search bar is working a little strange for me in Chrome. Otherwise, looks great!

Hi Scott -- a few comments

I can see some benefits of the new direction, but also a few problems:

-- the placement of the search icon is a bit wonky depending on the size of the browser (too close to one of the photos in the content areas)
-- I miss the chance to provide more detail about the Commons. are there options for a sidebar? Or maybe Colin's suggestion will help with this?
-- because the photos are different sizes, the design is hard to parse, visually, for me. Maybe take a look at this site -- http://cuny.is/gcdi to get a sense of how uniformally sized photos can increase usability

are there any other themes you considered for this?

edited to add: it's not just the size of the images that are inconsistent, but the amount of text that differs from news item to news item and that makes it all look a bit jumbled. even if we stay with a theme that displays news items like this (thumbnail, metadata, text description, link), I'm hoping we can do so with a theme that enforces CRAP principles - http://blogs.quovantis.com/crap-design-principles/

Hi Matt - I agree the search icon sucks - I took it out for now. I think the cache in my browser needed to be cleared out. I intentionally did not include a sidebar or navigation because I wanted to display as many news items as possible and didn't see the need to filter by category. I felt that when people want to see the news, they are interested in the latest news (not especially the old news - there is an infinite scroll to see older posts). When you drill down to a single item, there is a sidebar (showing "In Commons" latest posts). I personally like the "masonry" style, where items have different sized images and texts. To me, this appears more like newspaper columns and is more visually appealing. But I can understand how a more symmetrical design could be more accessible. Various community members post to this site - some might not use featured images, some might not know the rules of image sizing, some posts may not have a lot of text - but that can be resolved easily enough with some curation.

If we added a sidebar, what would we display?
If we added navigation, what would we show?

I made some changes to include navigation and a sidebar that is optionally displayed. Colin - I think your idea of a tagline is a good one, but I haven't thought up one yet. Any ideas?

Hi Scott, I think this is definitely coming along. Maybe for a tagline: "New projects, features, and other updates from the Commons team."

Belated thanks for your work on this, Scott! I think the improvements on the new/test site are great. If it helps anyone else review, I think you can go to this link to see it, in addition to the sidebar menu Scott mentioned:

https://news.commons.gc.cuny.edu/home/

I like displaying everything on Home, to keep it as fresh as possible since we're not posting too often here. I don't think we're posting anything unless it's of decent importance, either. Commons Buzz does seem kind of loose to me as well. Perhaps we can discuss this further. It seems only worth including categories we're using often - though Release Notes and Annual Reports are very specific, and perhaps it's good to have a category that's more of an "everything else."

I've never read one of those analytics posts -- when did we stop doing them? If they're very old, I could see just leaving them, as they'll be so far down the long tail anyway as to be pretty irrelevant to almost any user. And who knows, maybe someone will get some use out of them...

Hi Scott -- this is looking great -- thanks so much for your work on it!! I would say that, yes, we should keep the homepage current, so if there is content that is over a year old, that's fine to leave/weed out, especially analytics numbers that are now outdated.

For the tagline, how would you feel about something like "Reporting on new releases, announcements and info for the CUNY Academic Commons community"