I know noone asked, LOL, but I am an incurable “a place for everything and everything in its place” sort so couldn’t resist sharing my feedback on the forum organization structure.
I know that “Community” is our new word for “the forums” and it’s fine by itself in that respect but then using it inside the forum/Community as specific category labels/titles is confusing. One of the Mods explained that the Community section is for stuff specific to forum operations, but “Community Help” for example suggests that is where one would go to ask for help/advice from the Community, not about it. So within the Community section, I’d go back to calling the forums forums.
On the Creators side, I’d move all the promoting/affiliating stuff into its own section. For those complaining about all the vertical scrolling, this reduces the main Creators section by about half. Also it would means that if/when all the options under Settings - Preferences - Home Page are enabled, folks could subscribe to the Creators section and see only that stuff on their feed unless they also choose to subscribe to the Promoting section. So the people who use the home page feed (I don’t) and don’t want to see all the Show Me stuff there wouldn’t have to. Plus it’s just tidier that way - a section for creators/designing and a separate section for affiliates/promoting which can be two completely different areas of interest.
I’d combine “Tips & Tricks” and “How To” into one category as they’re the same thing and there’s already numerous threads in each with no rhyme or reason as to which one. Plus some of them are specifically about how to do things in the forum which is supposed to be over in the Community section anyway so I’d put them in “Forum Help”. Also, “How To” could be interpreted either as “this is where I should ask how to do something” or “this is where I should post my directions/tutorial on how to do something” … It’s just confusing. I think there should be one place to serve as a knowledge base for well, “Tips, Tricks & Tutorials” (with of course questions/clarifications/discussion in replies) and another place for asking questions/seeking advice.
I know I sounds overly-fussy but I really believe that in the beginning of something it’s better to be over-organized then under because in the future as things grow, I think it would be easier to combine and/or remove categories proven unnecessary then it would be to sort everything out later after weeks/months/years of postings.
I love it! Just looking at it, I have a much clearer idea about where I should post things or look for answers. I still don’t have any idea what the difference is between creator news and creator info, but other than that everything seems pretty self-explanatory.
I like it! I’m BIG on consistency and logical organization too!
Right now I find this new Community messy, and though “pretty”, not nearly as useful or informative as the old forums. I used to systematically read through everything (except the “Show Me” forum and some of the affiliate requests) thereby learning everything Zazzle. Now with all the clicking and scrolling, I’m only looking at the titles of new posts and only going into those that strike some cord. I’m sure I’m missing some interesting discussions, but it’s simply not worth my time and effort any longer. I’m glad I’m not just starting out and trying to wade through what I consider a morass.
Yes, please! As MMAnderson Art mentioned, I find myself avoiding the Forum now because it is so cumbersome, confusing and way more time consuming. ColsCreations, your suggestion would be a very good start to getting us back to a more user friendly Forum.
Thanks for putting this together. Our work in these forums is far from done, but for now the work is on pause while we wait for our provider to complete some updates. In the near future we will be adding more sections to the top navigation strip, and we’ll be updating the overall look and feel of the site to help with readability.
For now, you can simply click on the “Creators” link at the top of the page to access all of the familiar discussion forums. This page will eventually become the hub for Creators, so if you visit the several times a week then this will be the page you’ll likely want to bookmark. We split out the Community Help & Feedback section only because it makes reporting a bit easier, and because they’re intended to be temporary (though we may keep the testing forum around in some manner).
Great idea! I love the look of the new forum, but it doesn’t have the same feel to me as the old one. With the old forum it was easy to tell at a glance what was new and I knew exactly where to go for what I wanted or needed. Though I’m getting used to the new format, additional organization would be great.
Your proposed changes are very organized, easy to understand and well thought out. These changes would make things much easier to understand. In addition to your proposed changes, I would like to suggest going one step further. Under “News and Info”, I suggest adding specific categories for “New Products” and “Design Tool”. Also, if some type of obvious “NEW” icon could be added whenever new information has been added to a topic, I’d really appreciate that also.
Thanks, ColsCreations for starting this topic, I don’t think it’s overly-fussy at all. I used to work for a company that used the acronym DIRTFT (we called it “Dirt Foot”). It stood for “Do It Right The First Time”. As you said, it seems easier to make suggestions now rather than later. The Zazzle team has done a great job with the new forum and I’m sure they’re open to suggestions.
Wow, would you like to organize my PC folder structure for me?? 😉
Actually, I’ve love to know how you keep your graphic files organized, I’m constantly redoing all the folders on my computer and nothing I try works. It’s so bad I can never find what I’m looking for. Drowning in too much volume I guess.
Yes!! I would love having the creating and promoting separate. I have my promoting figured out the way I want to and rarely go to those forums. I guess new product launches would be in “creator info”? I guess I don’t even understand the difference between creator news and creator info?
In addition to the great suggestions, I’m hoping the upcoming changes will include a reduction in title size and white space. I’ve a decent-sized monitor with decent resolution, but I still get to see too few threads within a forum and too few posts within each thread. It ends being tedious enough to make me leave, probably missing things.
This looks good to me, I also embrace order 🙂 despite myself being highly disorganized at the best of times, possibly why I need as much help as possible! Thanks for taking time to work on this.
This looks so good! I too, like so many have been avoiding the “community” section as it has no organization and makes finding solutions or common problems difficult to find…and NO, you are not coming across “overly fussy”. Thanks for your great organizational work and skill. I hope Zazzle puts this or some of it anyway to use!
