Dissecting front page, part 2

Continuing from the previous article, let’s discuss about the left middle and bottom sections of the front page.

This part is usually still shown on modern computers with resolutions 1280×1024 or bigger. It may be partially hidden in 12″ laptops, depending on the selected font size.

The contents of the section are still primarily from the journal, but also photo gallery has a small section to spotlight a random gallery.

The front page shows in total eight most recent journal posts that are not reviews. The first one is shown on the top of the page and the rest in section More in Journal. The first article is shown with one paragraph (8) and the rest without any text, just the title. If the entry is in several categories, only one of those is shown to save space.

I have picked certain articles that have value over the time. These are listed in section Staff Picks (9). The picked articles have one WordPress custom field as a marker and the front page PHP script selects those articles in alphabetical order by titles.

The photo gallery is based on my own script. The galleries are managed through a specialised admin interface and the information is stored to several files. One file contains information about galleries themselves and every gallery has one file for the images.

The front shows one random image from the galleries (10). The gallery information file is read in and a gallery is selected using rand(). That gallery file is read in and the first photo is shown. Every gallery has similar type landscape image as the first image for better look for the gallery front page and that image is used here, too.

The bottom part of the left column contains information that is not designed to invite visitors to explore new parts of the site. Instead, it acts more like a brief sitemap to show the site structure.

The sections of the site (11) are listed in the same order as in the navigation menu. The main subsections are listed also. The journal categories are considered as subsections in this respect. The PHP script creates a data structure from the sections and subsections, and iterates it to produce the section table. The number of items is divided with three to create the columns. A
section is not, however, cut in the middle — all subsections are always shown under their section.

One of the sections is randomly selected and explained (12). The explanations are stored in the front page and the random number just decides which explanation to show this time.

That covers the left column. Next time, I’ll discuss more about the right column that concentrates mainly to the reviews.