App your design looks pretty good -- and your suggestion about putting it off until we do some other changes is a good one -- especially since I think the move to a cms is in order and that would be a good time to do it. Right now i'm comfortable with where they are.
-mouser
What you have on the site is a different type of social buttons than what I am proposing. The kind you have on the site right now are the kind that help people share the page they are on, on social networks.
The kind I am proposing,
as a first step, are the kind that link to
our pages on social networks, which encourages people to follow what we do more, bringing them back to the site again & again. It allows them to subscribe to us, since most people do not use RSS readers and do their subscribing by following sites on social networks. They can be added now, and it would be trivial work to do it...it's just an image that links to a page, no scripts needed.
If we are going to use the type we currently have at the bottom of the page, they would be best added to the most visited content on the main site, first, so people can spread the word about the software. And they need to be closer to that content to actually work. Way at the bottom of the page or at the bottom of the sidebar doesn't cut it. They should be at the upper right of the actual content of the page, in the same area, so visitors see them.
And since there is currently no room on most of those pages, without a slight redesign, and if there is plans on moving the main site to a CMS adding them now would be a waste of work, that was why I said to wait.
And JavaJones' comment about Discourse is something to think about, too.
If you are going to move the main site to a CMS, Discourse can be integrated into Wordpress. It's how SitePoint is currently publishing their articles on their main Wordpress based site, where every article automatically becomes a forum post, too, and integrating the replies on Discourse back as Wordpress comments to the articles on the main site.
You have a need for something like that with the various sections of the main site, and this would make things much easier in the long run, and make the forum content much more visible than the current DC blog, which doesn't integrate the discussion on the pages with the articles, which means visitors that land on those pages miss a lot of the action, here.
This is the original wp-discourse plugin:
https://github.com/d...scourse/wp-discourseAnd SitePoint's fork of it, with some extra added features & fixes:
https://github.com/s...tepoint/wp-discourseYou might need to do your own fork to add options for different behaviors for specific categories, like software pages, so that when someone wants to comment on an app, perhaps with a bug report or other issue, they get sent to the
section for that app (if it has one), rather than the carbon copy of the app's content page on the forum.
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