Think about what is the homepage for your site

My homepage is the friend page for livejournal, a page where I have access to all my friend’s entries: like a RSS reader just for livejournal, only with better layout. In order to access any of the other useful functions like the last 5 comments on my journal, who has sent me a private message, or even any livejournal announcements, I need to visit a page called “home”. However, to my knowledge, almost all of my friends only access their friend pages, and refreshes it constantly, while maybe check their home page once per day (or like me, once per month).

Lets look at facebook, the page called home is an all-in-one location for your friends’ feeds, friend invitations, event invitations, birthday reminders etc… Basically everything you need. I know I refresh my facebook home page constantly, and not my profile page. That is probably because I will get a notice in my home page if someone wrote on my wall anyways.

I am quite sure that livejournal has designed their home page to be as useful as possible, but they didn’t realize that all of their users set their friend page as their homepage instead, making the home page irrelevant since people don’t use it anyways.

Just makes me think of the importance of web analytics in recognizing these trends. If I were livejournal, I will probably put some side bars in the friend page, making the friend page serve as a hub for activities, since all the traffic is there anyways. Users often don’t behave consistently to how you designed the site to be used as, and the web is so flexible that there is no excuse not changing the functions on a page to adapt to the unexpected usage patterns.

I will share my thoughts on how small cosmetic changes can make a big difference in user experience really soon.

Yakitate Japan! Cosplay

Actually, I hate introductory posts, because I never know what to write. Give me a topic, and I can research, organize, and put it all together. But when it comes to introductions, I can talk about a million things, and what should I choose so you are not going to feel bored?

I guess the same can be said about online communities. Over the weekend I was having a chat with my friends (with my usual rant of how wonderful APOC is XD), and I was just throwing around ideas. I admit that I am an anime otaku, and so it was only natural that the idea for a cosplay online community was formed. Of course, the idea is not new, but I think I can do a much better job than this. Looking at a Japanese equivalent, I don’t think you need to know Japanese to feel that Cure is a much better site. My project is to create the best cosplay online community in America! How exciting is that?

But where is the money coming from? Donations? Sponsorship? Banner ads? With the anime and manga industry going downhill financially, maybe not the best idea. And a site which survives solely on donations just feels a little too uncertain (unless you are wikipedia). As a fan, I love the idea for a community that is for my fellow otakus, but until I can come up some great ideas as to how to financially support the site, I shall wait.

And then we started talking about school, and how my favorite paper I wrote for school was one on private military companies… An online community for veterans! (which later I realized already existed, and can be found with 1 google search) The community will connect the soldiers with their friends and family, and we can have all kinds special features for this community! But then it could be dealing with sensitive data, such as where the troops are located, what they are doing there etc… It might just be paranoia, but I could see a site like this needs heavy moderation to unsure that its users does not post anything “top secret”. And the technical requirements for this site might be out of our budget range…

I could possibly generate endless ideas for an online community, and reject each one of them base on the perceived difficulties I think I will face. And even if I personally love my site, no one can predict how popular a site will become. Good design and layout might not get you as much traffic as a site with terrible code (hu hum… my…. space…), or your topic might be just a little toooo niche…

Thus, I really hope to learn what can or cannot be done, and how to do it through the APOC program. This year will be very busy and intense, but I don’t think I have been so excited about school ever!