** THE SITUATION **


Good news: OpenDesigns.org collection is growing very fast, almost a thousand per year.
Sad news: It will be more and more difficult to get an overview of it all. With 20 designs per display page, and having say 4.000 designs in two years from now, means scrolling through 200 pages one by one.

** THE NEED **

Find ways to filter out the designs according to different parameters.

** THE IDEA **

Filter 1: Sorting designs
Be able to sort designs by name, by weekly, monthly, yearly and total downloads, by design name, and by author name. Another help would be to spell out the template name next to the preview picture (under the author name).

Filter 2: Popularity lists
It could be a top-ten or top-whatever list for the last 7 days, last 30 days, last 365 days, and lastly for all the days back to the start of OD. In this way the visitor can quickly see current short-term trends (7-day list), medium-term trends (30-day list) and long-term trends (365-day list). However, these popularity lists move with time, so old templates may vanish out from the lists as new ones come along, even if the old templates once were popular.

Filter 3. Favorites Gallery
The gallery is the answer to the shortcoming of the top-whatever lists. In the Gallery we would preserve historically the templats that at one point or another made it to any top-whatever list for a minimum specified amount of time. When that happens, they would be transferred to the Favorites Gallery. We could have a weekly, monthly and yearly and all-time favorites gallery.

Advantages to users:
They have a chance to get a quick overview, without HAVING to scroll through hundreds of pages. After that, they can still decide to scroll through, but at least they do not have to.

Incentives for designers:
The possibility to land on a popularity list or favorites gallery is a good incentive for designers to give their best, sometimes to spend those extra hours to make a good design even better.

What do you think???

If memory serves me, this is not the first time Gerhard has suggested this. This topic always gets big thumbs from the members but (for all I know) for reasons unknown it has never been tried by the admins.

I agree I think this site is in desperate need of more user friendly sorting in so far as number of downloads and/or popularity voting etc.

So we can only ask...
1. Can it done?
2. What can we as a community do to get it done... what can we all do to help?

Pete

Here are my ideas:
Re: Filter 3. Favorites Gallery
In order to be a favourite, a design has to stay on one of the lists for double the period of the list? That way the Weekly Favorites Gallery is a list of templates which have had their 2 weeks of fame, while the Monthly Favorites Gallery represents templates which may not be as flashy, but they maintained popularity for a while. The All Time Favorites Gallery could be a very exclusive place indeed (by running off of the annual statistics).
Filter 4. Founder's Picks
Anyone who registered on December 3rd, 2006 (or we could say in 2006, or even use some other function, like 100+ posts, or staff-only) can 'Pick' a design each time-period to be added to the Picks gallery. Each design remains on the list as long as at least one person 'picks' it each time-period. They would be sorted by number of 'picks', with the most 'picked' designs at the top.

Posted By: perthmetroNot too fond of the Founder's pick ... just seems a bit too elitist to me. We're all equal here no matter when we joined.

Yup, same here and I had joined in 2006. Just seems too snooty and wrong

I like the idea of highlighted designers, where a block on the home page is rotated between the designers with X templates, or have designers "stamped" or approved by admins. Maybe have this link to their profile with an interview? (set list of questions?).

Definitely in desperate need of a sort-by viewer though, this site doesn't run as fast as it should and it can take a while to go through all the pages!

What about a rating system? Like 1-5 stars. That would be cool too.

I think we have a lot of good ideas even if they couldn't all be used at once. Any word from the folks that would actually do the coding if these are feasible in the near future?

Why is it only now after this discussion the admins have decided to ask for help? (if the wheel squeaks for long enough it gets oiled so they say). We all here understand you have lives and put in a week (or more) of your life (we can only say thank you so much for that), but I don't understand why asking for help couldn't have been done sooner, given the multiple times it has been brought up with so much interest... none the less, good on you for asking for help and thumbs up for all those who can help.

PS. Thanks to all the admins for all their work.

Pete

Posted By: gnome @Kirby: I'm not fond of a user rating system, as people sometimes vote high or low for reasons other than the quality of the design, but there may be a better way to work in a rating...

Re: Founder's Pick: it could be a staff pick gallery, or use another metric, such as all registered members . Here is a variation:

We could give every user a 'favourite' option, which adds designs to their personal list of favourites, which will appear on their user page. The designs which have been favourited the most (perhaps 1% of total designs) are added to the favourites gallery. The favourite option would need to appear about a month before the gallery would start up (to get enough data to make it relevant). What do you think of that?

In regards the favourites option you could do an Amazon sort of thing, were you can create lists of your favourite templates or certain types of templates, e.g. galleries, portals, 3 columns, red or whatever and then link to it from your site as a sort of "recommended templates" link.