On the evening of March 17th, we made a few changes to the Community. Many of these changes are a result of a survey we launched early last year to get feedback on if the Community was serving your needs appropriately. We received some great feedback, and also had some changes of our own we wanted to implement. Here are a few things you can expect to be changing around the Community soon:
A fresher design will be implemented to more closely match the look and feel of the other areas of Constant Contact.
Navigation will be simplified as well as the number of areas that posts live. Going forward we plan to have:
One area to get product support. We will be consolidating 5 or more separate support areas into one hub.
One area to get advice - whether that be on the design of a campaign (previously the “Critique My Campaign” board, advice on your website, or if you just want to ask general marketing advice. The Community should be a place where we can all pool our knowledge on various aspects of marketing.
One area where we will be posting blog-type content on all things Constant Contact. If you’ve been a fan of our recent giveaways and sweepstakes, they will be living here.
The feedback area will be remaining the same, although we hope to be able to consolidate this into a single feedback posting area.
The Developer Community will largely remain the same for our folks needing support with the API.
We may also continue to experiment with some new and existing private and more focused areas.
On that same topic, the navigation menu will be moving up to the upper right corner of the header:
- This reduces the need of having to scroll below the fold to find the menu and places it neatly at the top of every page.
The search bar will also be moving to the top header of every page, with the aim of making searching for content easily accessible no matter where you are on the page.
Reducing some accumulated clutter. These were some areas that included things such as Unread Posts at the bottom of some pages. We want to eliminate certain extras that may have just contributed to busier page layouts so a focus can be put on participating in the Community.
Unrelated to this redesign, but another area of feedback from our survey last year was outdated or old content being found. We’ve been working on a cleanup effort throughout the last year, and will continue to do so.
Looking Forward we plan to implement some additional changes we hope are non-disruptive. You may see us testing out some features for organizing and labeling content, bubbling up the most relevant/lively topics, showcasing product ideas to vote on, changing our Community ranking system, putting out new and interesting content, and hosting industry related discussions. We feel like the Community has a great opportunity to be more focused on small business owners and marketers to talk with each other, as they could easily share the same struggles, challenges, and milestones.
We look forward to continuing to improve the Community. As always, your feedback is welcomed. Feel free to leave a comment on anything you’d like to see added, big or small.
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