Rearranging the Guide home page

[jessyclubsoda]

There are a lot of different banners on the Guide home page which are no longer useful or part of our aims for the website.

It would be good to remove some and rearrange others based off our learnings of how people use the site, to make the home page more streamlined.

As a start, it would be useful to remove the sponsor banner as we no longer have an explicit sponsor and currently only fill that space with our logo.

It would also be good to remove the bottom banner with the 'Special Offers, Drink Reviews' etc. bit as we will be taking a new tact to getting people to sign up to our mailing list and it is currently never used by site users.

There may be other options to think about here such as moving the 'Search' box (as it is used a lot less than the clickable drinks boxes are) and replacing it with either the Email sign up or clickable venue locations (by city such as London, Manchester etc.) as well as the potential of adding a 'Recently Added Drinks/Venues' carousel but it would be good to discuss this with you

[iteles]

@jessyclubsoda 👍 This sounds good. If there are certain sections where you would like to know more about how they are used (or not) by your visitors, it might be worth linking them up in #656 as well.

For the sponsor section, are you moving in a different direction altogether or is this more of a case of you wanting to have an admin option to hide and show the section?

[jussi-club-soda]

If possible, I would like an admin option to hide and show the sponsor image, as you never know what we'll want to do next! :)

[jessyclubsoda]

In figuring out the best place to host our email signup form #660 , we have been rethinking what our home page looks like

Based on data from Google Analytics, we know that using the search box which is the main thing you see when you load the home page is only the third most popular user journey on the site.

This is barely used but almost the only thing you see

Our users prefer to scroll down and click on 'Drink Type' pills or click through to search directly for venues or drinks through the header. It was interesting that on our call @nelsonic mentioned that users mainly use search bars only when they cannot find something

Here is a potential way we could boost the more popular way of searching by Drink Type apply it to Venue Location to encourage better Venue searching. We could then place an email sign up below that. If we were to go ahead with a design like this I would also suggest removing the 'Recommended Venues' banner as based off our conversations with Ben Yoskovitz - these venues aren't relevant to the vast majority of our users

We would then have the 'Recommended Drinks' and 'Nominate Venue' banners below and I would suggest removing the current banner with a link to email sign up, as we will have placed that further up

This would make our home page

• More streamlined
• More relevant to users
• Quicker to navigate

@jussi-club-soda It would be good to confirm that your thoughts are aligned with me on this

NOTE: This would mean that there was no search bar at all on the home page but there would still be search available on the Drinks and Venue pages. I don't think this would matter as the search is so under used currently but would be interested to hear thoughts about whether we should keep a search towards the bottom of the page

[jussi-club-soda]

Yep, all makes sense to me! A couple of thoughts:

I'd like to still keep the "View Drinks" button under the drinks banner - an easy way to see and search all drinks once you get there on your journey?

Can we make the location/city pills editable? So we can always decide which cities to list at any time?

Can we include the "Find one near me" search option on https://www.clubsodaguide.com/search/venues page too? Maybe as a third button under the search bar?

And maybe we could keep the original search bar from the top of the page and move it as the last item near the bottom menu? That way, if someone scrolls all the way down there, they can still use it - and we can keep an eye on its usage? It's not a big item so shouldn't be too much of an eyesore there?

[jessyclubsoda]

Thanks for your suggestions @jussi-club-soda

A checklist for this issue then would be:

• [ ] Move search bar from top of home page to put at bottom

• [ ] Add 'Explore All Venues' pills in same format as 'Explore All Drinks' with 'Find One Near Me' button placed underneath it

• [ ] Remove 'Great Places for Mindful Drinkers' section

• [ ] Remove 'Special Offers' etc. banner

Here's a visual of what the page should look like

I'm going to upgrade the priority of this as it ties in so closely with our email mailing list priority