A long time ago I wrote an article on why the New Facebook Sucked. This was before the live streaming wall and there were a lot of inconsistencies which, for a site that large, needed to be addressed. I recently experienced something similar with our own site, Obox Design.

At the beginning of June Marc and I made it a mission that we were going to create a theme company. We also committed to doing it in 30 days which was documented in our theme diary.

We knew that certain things would have to be compromised in order for us to get everything complete in the time. We just made sure that we prioritized our time on making cool products.

Since the beginning of our 30 day endeavor I was experiencing a massive creative block when it came to Obox's new front page which would introduce everyone to our themes. I often just thought 'don't worry, it will come to you'.

In the last 48hrs of the project it still hadn't 'come to me' and I wasn't ever happy with the way our front page looked or functioned. I knew that it was something I had to come back to at a later date.

So after the initial launch and just over a month on, we have finally completed the new home page which includes a total revamp of the layout including the introduction, content and footer area's. We have also added a few new pages and tidied up others.

I'm sure there will be some of you who agree and others who are wondering what I am talking about when I say our home page sucked. So in this post I am going to break it down for you. These are things you need to look for when creating your sites.

Clickable intro box

One of the things which bothered me most about our home page was the intro box. Here are some of the things I didn't like about it:

1. There was no selling being done. We are trying to sell you themes but the message was barely being sent across.
2. The 'Go Shopping' button was a weak attempt to entice the user to click through. Its size, contrast and copy were all wrong.
3. The screenshots clashed with the color of the contact bar. In particular, the screenshot of Arcade stuck out like a saw thumb. Way too much of a clash of colors.
4. We needed four tabs but I could only think of copy for three of them. So the support tag was always a compromise. The icon clashed with the icon theme we were using in the rest of the site.

How did we fix this?

What we have done is remove the clickable bars completely. We have decided to go conventional with our home page in the sense that its layout is pretty run of the mill. We have some intro text and a random scrolling theme screenshot on the right.

We have moved all the 'call to action' features below the intro bar and summarized their points.

Most importantly we have a big green button which will hopefully encourage visitors to click through more than the previously terrible 'Go Shopping' wording.

View our theme collection

Without a doubt the part I couldn't stand most about our home page was the 'Take a look at our theme collection' area. To break it down quickly, it was bland and did no selling, it was also 40px narrower than the rest of the content for reasons I have no idea why and the screenshots we too big.

The space was also being underutilized in general and could easily be considered bland. When I say bland I don't mean minimalist… I mean straight up bland…. Boring.

How did we fix this?

The first thing I did was changed the layout of the theme collection slider. It now queries our four latest themes and is now organized as four in row instead of two.

Below the screenshots we have another call to action button which invites the visitor to experience the 'rocket power' of our themes.

In order to fill the space better more (and cut out the blandness) we have included a link to the latest blog post on We Are not Freelancers. To the right there is a newsletter sign up form which will be modded slightly once we have our affiliate program up and running.

Last but not least, the footer

Personally I didn't mind the old footer too much. In terms of its layout I was happy, the only thing I wanted to change was the color of the borders separating the content from each other.

However, Marc didn't feel the same way and, to an extent, he was correct.

So the footer needed to change (in fact Marc wanted it changed a long while ago, even before we created the theme co.) but I didn't know what to do with it? Go wild with a completely different layout, or stay conservative and fill it with relevant links and content.

I decided to go with the latter; there was no need to go over board when simple links to the rest of our site would have been more than fine.

The old footer contained, 'About Us, 'RSS Feeds', 'Copyright', 'Twitter', 'Flickr' and a Contact form. We have changed that layout completely now to a more standard list setup which is separated into 'Obox Design, 'Obox Themes', 'Our Network' and a 'Copyright' section.

The most important part of the footer is that it re-introduces our custom client work with links under 'Obox Design'. We removed client work from the site while we got the Themes up and running, but it's a good place to put the links for now and I'm sure it will be clicked on once in a while (are tracking it), along with adding that link the client work page has also changed in layout.

To summarize

I think you will notice that so far we have increased the presence of our themes, we have two call to action buttons, minimized some of the 'splurb' and made the home page an almost one-stop-shop for users.

All in all I believe that the home page is a huge improvement. People no longer have to click around to see content, it is all presented up front. There are more call to action buttons and our themes have more of an organized presence on the page.

All these details are the type of things we look for whenever designing any of our themes or custom/client websites. Even with the new layout as it is I am sure that if you gave me an hour or so to break it down I will find quite a few issues.

However, for now I think it serves more purpose and will hopefully yield some cool results.