New Notifications Bell Feature on WSO

Fellow Primates, just a quick heads up...for those of you logged in, you may have noticed some changes recently including:

1. A new bell icon next to the mail icon in order to split out actual messages from system notifications. Some users brought up in our user tests that it would be nice if the inbox wasn't cluttered with SB/MS/@mention and other notifications...so we've broken those out (kind of how Facebook does). The step we hope to get done next week is to have the drop down notifications actually direct you straight to the content you are getting notified vs linking to the notification itself...stay tuned!

2. A new simplified navigation. Something else that came out of our most recent user test was that the navigation was too complicated. So we simplified it with 3 primary menus and put the forums, recent content, top content, etc under one main Community tab. I think this makes more logical sense and allowed us to reduce the vertical header space in order to bring the content up even higher on the page (nice for small screens)....along those lines...

3. We tweaked some of the design / formatting at the top of each discussion to save even more vertical space...

Upcoming...unfortunately, we have the cleanup from hell coming up...we are going to be deleting, noindexing, redirecting and combining thin/crap content to make the site leaner and meaner. It's a beast of a task so we're in the process of developing some in house tools to help us. This should help our SEO and overall growth.

Happy weekend! Patrick