Food4Thought > Temporary Contest

[spielerman]

With some help from fellow MuggleNet staffers I was able to bring a basic caption contest back to MuggleNet. I'm tracking hits via my own StatCounter and I've been posting about the CC on our social media (FB and Twitter) as well as the site. The goal is to re-introduce people to the contest and also to get them familiar with the weekly schedule of New Week > New Contest. (And to prepare them for when we can introduce the NEW version in a few months with all of its complete functionality) @pironic .

The link: http://www.mugglenet.com/captioncontest.shtml

Everything you see is HTML, Java or CSS. Except of course for the Entry Form which is php.

In doing this, I had to ask myself what was important to keep regarding the look and feel of the contest. While you can see that the basic structure of the main page has remained the same, I've made it prettier (with images as banners) so it's less text-based. The only four pages are Main, About, Entry and Archive. The archive is displaying lists only and not using the Java CaptionScroller.

Constructing this "bare-bones" version allowed me to decide on what was important. I suppose I'd still like the future contest main page / subsequent pages to be reminiscent or familiar with this.

[pironic]

awesome... do we want layout something like that?

[spielerman]

We'll need a place for the features such as Top Ten, Search, Archive, all that again - I remember in v2.0 it was alongside the Next and Prev buttons. But this time since we have our own section we could put it in margins or somewhere else. I remember the sections were all buttons at the top of the page. It looked clean.

I suppose what I mean to say is that, we don't need to let this structure / flow replace what comes as a result of the code you're already using, but to allow it to be a sort of guide for when we can tweak appearances in the later stages.

[pironic]

perfect, i'll continue down the path of making them buttons along the top nav bar :)