Make design more interesting

[jeremyboggs]

The design is pretty text heavy and pretty bland. Explore some options for making it a bit more visually interesting.

[ahegel]

I like this site's paneled design with both images and text snippets to describe a few of the site's articles:

They use tags that users can sort through for content as well, which might be something to look into.

Even simple squares like here (http://storymaps.esri.com/home/) could be really effective on a homepage to give visitors an idea of what kinds of lessons they'll find on our site.

Also see http://www.parsleyandsprouts.com/ http://www.sebastiansejer.com/en/ http://studiofaculty.com/ http://www.mooi-design.com/

[ahegel]

Some more design inspiration: the website for Project Bamboo DiRT. http://dirt.projectbamboo.org/

• At the very top of the page they say "Feedback needed: new categories" with a link to give feedback (a tool wish list page that allows submissions and discussion) as an immediate call to action
• It has a separate "Contribute" page listing all the ways you can contribute to the site (submit, be a reviewer, make comments on the site)
• It lets you sort through all of its tools based on various criteria (we could do this with lessons)
• It has a search bar for those who know exactly what they're looking for already

And here is a website with examples of sliding image carousels that we could use on the homepage to showcase recently added lessons: http://wowslider.com/

[ahegel]

Here's a particularly nice-looking "Browse All" page where users can filter through all the content on the site (something we could think about doing for our lessons):

http://canopycanopycanopy.com/browse?sort=published_at_desc&tags=&types=&page=1&per=21