Member Website Plans and Question
Hello, friends! In concert with James (praise be), I've been working on one of the projects Bubtra hired me to do: a version of the member homepage that's more than just a glorified news feed. Despite most of our talking taking place on Discord, the Brotherhood does a lot of stuff through our site. My goal to make those parts of the site more accessible for the average member.
How It Works
Right now, all the links to pages where members actually do things are either part of the increasingly bloated Administration page, or hidden behind menus or other links. That means a lot of clicking for everyone and a lot of scrolling on mobile, which makes up a large and growing part of our site users. We've made this look work for years, but it's time for a makeover.
The new design will be more like an "activity dashboard" than just a landing page. The first iteration will take member activity links like submitting gaming screenshots and editing character sheets from other parts of the site and put them on the first page you see when you log in. Later versions will have more customisation, sections specifically for new members, and activity recommendations like the ones Novitiates currently see. If James and I can figure out a way to implement them, there might even be more widgets that integrate the site with Discord.
What About the Administration Page?
The Administration page isn't going away. It's just having its scope cut down to, well, administering things. The new activity dashboard will be focused on being accessible for normal members (i.e. not unit leaders) who just want to jump into club activities.
Most importantly, leadership functions like news posts and recommending awards or promotions will still be linked from the Administration page. Likewise, the functions various staff positions use will stay on the Administration page, as will the links for members to edit personal information like their email address and password.
There will also still be overlap between the activity dashboard and the Administration page for things like creating competitions. In those cases, the relevant links will be on both pages.
How You Can Help
This is where you come in. The activity dashboard will have a Quick Links section for members (especially mobile users) to get to their favourite pages faster. This will be one of our top customisation priorities, but we need to start somewhere.
Which activity-related parts of the site do you visit most often? The Competitions page? Submitting gaming screenshots? Your character sheets? The item stores? The ACC? Let us know in the comments!
Closing Out
I'm super excited to see how the release of the activity dashboard turns out, and I hope you are too. If you'd like to see an early version of how it might turn out, stay tuned for my next post!
Links
- Brotherhood Leadership Feedback Form: Click Here
- Emissary Staff Google Group: [Log in to view e-mail addresses]
Emissary Staff Suggestion Box: Click Here
Bluesky: DJB Official Bluesky
Instagram: DJB Official Instagram
X/Twitter: DJB Official X/Twitter
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Glad to finally see this change! Props to the Emmisary and SCL staffs for this.
What an exciting project. I almost always only use the homepage to go to the Competitions list, so that’s my vote to highlight—getting to available competitions and perhaps showcasing a few that are ending soon.
Definitely a move in the right direction!
As requested, my most visited pages are easily:
Competitions
My Dossier
Submit Gaming Scores
Society Progress
Degree Progress
Hot
I've brought this up a few different times in various chats before, so here goes: I would really love to see the Character Sheet Reference made more accessible somehow. Whether in some kind of dashboard form or even just being added to the Resources section. It feels like the CS equivalent to Item Research, so that seems like a good spot for it to me. In any case, it's a really helpful tool for people and sometimes they don't know it exists or how to find it, so I think there's a good opportunity to do something with that now.
Probably gonna get a myriad of suggestions but my most used links are:
Competitions Possessions Character Sheet and Load outs Member Shops Shadow Academy
Awesome repprt and exciting project! I use the competitions link and the possessions/character sheet/loadouts link the most.
I love it.
Okay hear me out, a mini game of pouring salt on a hutt and watching it melt. The hutt obviously has Kamjins face. What more would we need?
(But seriously excited to see this kick off)
My most used links tend to be Wiki, Character Sheets/Load Outs, Competitions. I know I may be a rarity when it comes to my love for our Wiki, haha. The Shops are also a great one as mentioned by Korvyn.
Comps for sure! Character Sheet.
More green.
Super green