Ning Customer Community Will Soon Get a Makeover

I just wanted to let this community know that we'll be slapping a new coat of paint on the Creators Network soon. I know that when this change happens in the next few weeks there will be some people who absolutely hate it and some people who will love it and want to emulate it. Such is the way change sometimes happens. Drastically. Surprisingly! To make it less surprising, I wanted to give you a heads up.

So, what will change, and why are we making this change?

Time to get our Design Studio on

We need to practice what we preach and trade the Creators Network up to the Design Studio. We had some custom code that was holding us back from making the switch, but that is no longer an issue. So we're going for it and upgrading.

Simplify. Refresh. Experiment!

The current design is nice and clean and welcoming, but it's looked this way for almost three years. Time to shake out some cobwebs! We'd like to try out a two-column design and experiment with the Activity Feed. We like to "eat our own dog food" and use the same product we're building. This is another opportunity to do that.

Focus on the forum

The idea of having a full-featured network where customers can hang out might seem like an attractive one, but experience has shown us that most NCs are usually looking for information — and in particular tips from other NCs. Subsequently, most of the features we have had enabled over time have generally gone unused. Most people gravitate directly to the forum, so why not make the forum the centerpiece? We also moved a lot of help content into the Help Center with that knowledgebase redesign, so having videos here on Creators might be superfluous.

Remove stagnant groups

We will be cleaning out a few old pages that haven't been trafficked in a long time, but we won't be deleting any major chunks of content. We will, however, remove a few groups. We have way too many groups here on Creators, some of which haven't seen any activity in six months or a year. We will try to contact the group owner before removing a group.

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The bottom line is that this redesign won't be a drastic one. We will strip out most of the features and focus on a few key features, and we may add more features over time. In fact, we may redesign it again in a few months! We'll give you some warning before making the switch, but there may be a day or two where we are fiddling with the details. You'll probably visit here one day and be surprised that it's changed, but our hope is that it will be a welcome refreshment of this community.

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