Improved Visibility and UI on Homepage
It’s currently too difficult to find or discover things of a particular interest on the IDEAS website. Along with better use of filters, I recommend a different homepage UI of stacked containers with horizontal scrolling, similar to what you see in most media layouts (ie Netflix) instead of the endless, seemingly random vertical scroll and buried navigational options. It’s perfectly fine to have staff picks and most popular at the top (or listed under a Contests section) because you want people to have a good first impression of the website and IDEAS platform, but then just under that box there could be a section for “Expiring Soon”, since that deserves a little urgent attention, followed by other categories (most recent, random entries, themes, achieved support, on shelves etc). If you always see the same things on the homepage it gets stale, and if it’s all random it’s going to look messy and unprofessional. The objective should be to make the homepage as inviting and interactive as possible to keep people coming back and browsing, and that’s by providing more interesting, navigable visuals. Most of the votes will probably continue to be driven externally from people promoting, but it would be great to hook more users with a better browsing experience.