Homepage Redesign

Hello all!

I've been working with Mike on some administrative stuff and one of the things we have been talking about is redesigning the homepage. Right now the homepage looks like crap and we want to make it better. I want to turn it over to the community to get some feedback.

-What information should be on the homepage?

-How should the homepage look?

I appreciate everyone's response. 

leaderboard on homepage where banned members don't show up.

Home pages are so pre-2000. Take 'em right to the debate page.

Thats kinda what I’m thinking. I like the old DDO homepage. 

Show the most popular threads and debates (in the voting period) on the home page.

I'm thinking something along the lines of this https://web.archive.org/web/20120217191029/http://www.debate.org:80/

We really need to get away from the DDO platform though. As it stands, we're basically a carbon copy of DDO. 

You beat me to it...

Holy shit that chick is so eloquent, the rap battle one. WTF year is that from that shit predates me.

She is using a rhyme scheme that hasn't/hadn't been invented yet, if you read her lines at a certain pace it's an extremely evolved flow.

We could probably just make this the home page https://www.debateart.com/debates

Debates Quick Link

Forum Quick Link

Leaderboards Quick Link

Then a explanation

If you can, please try not to lose all the space huge borders would take from us. We are mostly text based. Unless there is some technical reason, the page doesn't need to be centered so severely.

Just make the page user friendly so that visitors can easily see and go to the parts of the site that interests them.

OK. What I'll probably do is design a few concepts and put it up to vote. 

Make sure they know the design they vote for does not guarantee it will be used. It will be used as a guide.