New frontpage

At our Friday work morning last week, Caitlin, Mary and I came up with a sketch for the new frontpage of the website. We want it to answer the following questions:

• What the heck is this thing?
• How do I get started?
• Is this fun?
• Is this website alive?
• If I’m good, what could I do?
• If I’m just starting out, what can I do?

Our final design included a progress bar of sorts highlighting the main tenets of Looking Glass- Create, Share, Remix.  Underneath it will be a collection of worlds and categories (New Users, Top New Remixes) surrounding a tag cloud. Although we think the whole design is really cool, we thought it would be more feasible to implement it increments. I am starting out with the piece that will give us the most bang for our buck - the progress bar.

This is what it looks like contracted:

This is expanded.

It’s still a work in progress (ha), but I like the look overall. (No small part because of the awesome tutorial partials I took from the tutorial page).  In the future, I  want to round the corners of the expanded part and work on the spacing. I also need to add some links in to the download and sign up page.

Without the worlds/tags clouds underneath it, the progress bar looks a little sad in its condensed form. For now, I think that it will start out with the Create tab expanded so the page doesn’t look so empty. The next part of the incremental implementation could be square partials for the worlds that (for now) would just arrange themselves like a photo album underneath the bar.

Speaking of feasibility, I also had a discussion with Caitlin about where badges skill tests stand. Instead of taking the time to figure out how to test the different categories of skills, I will switch my focus to a couple of badges and fully flesh out the tests for them. Once we see how those play out in implementation it could give us some perspective on the rest of the tests.

As such, for the rest of tonight and tomorrow I am working on implementing the Stories 101 tests and being able to tell if an expressionStatement is in a block that is disabled