There is nothing wrong with your monitor. The DU homepage has changed.

Skinner ADMIN

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Tue May-02-06 05:27 PM
Original message

There is nothing wrong with your monitor. The DU homepage has changed.

Edited on Tue May-02-06 05:59 PM by Skinner

As many of you know, we announced two weeks ago that we were working on a new homepage for the website, and at that time we gave you a little info about what to expect. The wait is finally over, and you can see the results of our work on the DU homepage:

http://www.democraticunderground.com

Believe it or not, there is a point to all these changes. A couple months ago, we unveiled the new DU Journals functionality, which gives every DU member your own personal space where you can highlight your best postings on the DU discussion forums. (For information about DU Journals, click here.) A number of DUers have been inspired by the Journals, and have put more effort into their postings here on DU. This has given us a lot more quality stuff to highlight on our homepage.

So, we like to think of the new homepage as Phase II of the DU Journals upgrade. Now that some DUers are putting so much more effort into their writings here, we feel that we owe it to them to give their posts more prominent placement on our homepage -- and to send traffic directly to their DU Journals. Our vision for the DU homepage is to create a kind-of grassroots mega-blog, where regular people can gain a wide audience for their writings. It's a combination of discussion forum and blog.

The new homepage has much greater functionality than our old homepage. It gives you many of the features that used to only be available on the discussion forum -- and more. You now have direct access to the most popular forums. You now have the Latest and Greatest threads listed on the homepage. You now have all the navigation icons from the forums right there on the homepage. You now have a new mail notification on the homepage, with direct access to your Inbox and your My DU page. There is no longer a strict separation between the forums and the rest of the site. Everything is integrated now.

This is just the beginning

We have a lot more exciting ideas for DU, and this new homepage is just the beginning. This new homepage will give us the flexibility and power we need to take DU where we want to be this election year.

If you don't like the new homepage

We know how difficult change is for many people here, and we fully expect that there will be some confusion and consternation about the new homepage. Now that we've changed the homepage, you might not be able to find everything as quickly as you used to. That is normal.

If you don't like the DU homepage, we hope that you will give it a chance. Try it for a week. It is much more functional and user-friendly than our old homepage, and we believe that most DUers will like the new homepage more than the old one once you get used to it.

And if you really, really don't like the new DU homepage.... admit it, you didn't go to the homepage that often anyway.

How to get your posts onto the DU homepage

The most important thing you need to do to get your posts onto the DU homepage is to write good stuff -- put some effort into writing. Once you do that, here are some tips:

1. Create a DU Journal and remember to add your best posts to it. When we add original writing to our homepage, we give preference to postings that are in members' Journals.

2. It helps if your post gets at least a couple recommendations.

3. If you are putting a lot of effort into your Journal, you might want to contact a DU Admin to let us know. We can track the Journals that we like, and keep an eye out for updates to add to our homepage.

What to do about any bugs, problems, errors, etc.

If you encounter any bugs, problems, errors, or whatever, please post them in this thread to let us know so we can fix them.

Thank you so much for your patience and understanding. And most of all, thank you for being a member of our community.

Skinner, EarlG, Elad
DU Administrators