We build product and experience loosely using Jobs to Be Done (as progress) model.
I think Code Academy gets at this. What is the member trying to do when they reach the site to ultimately improve their current situation? We’re also trying to achieve this and simplify.
I’d love to experiment with a format more like what’s on the Code Academy site, but don’t want to be disruptive to our members by experimenting on the live site. Is there a way to “preview” changes that affect layout?
I’ve also noticed that some minor formatting/aesthetic changes cause some issues with the TOC plugin we’re using I believe mostly due to latency (it takes a minute to catch up and reload properly after changes?) so we haven’t done much fine tuning as we rely on that feature heavily for our docs.
Also, if anyone has feedback on our site’s layout/organization that’d also be awesome. It’s helpful to get fresh eyes!
Yup there is! You can use the customize section in your community admin settings to make and preview changes. See this beautiful guide that explains how it all works:
Seeing as you are interested in Codecademy’s theme, I figured I should also share this:
Picking this back up after we’ve made some changes.
First observation, it’s not possible to preview a different layout for categories as far as I can tell. We wanted to change the way the categories appeared from using Boxes with Featured Topics to Categories with Featured Topics. Updating this setting changed the live site. Just sharing here for others benefit.
New question, if possible, how can we edit the color of these links and text? We find it visually confusing on what’s a link and what’s not and there are so many links here. We’d like to customize the color of certain links to help people focus on what they actually need or may want to click on to further explore.
Yes. You can change the colour/appearance of anything by going to the Customise tab of your Admin dashboard and either editing the CSS of your current theme or adding a theme component with the changes.
You can use your Chrome inspector to find the right CSS class to target.
Thank you! Any way to remove these unread and new counts from the subcategories? Got the color adjusted, but just think they clutter the view and would like to hide them. I didn’t find this in settings. We are just using the Light theme.
Just wanted to close the loop here in case anyone else is curious about how to get a look similar to discuss.codeacademy.com with a custom home page banner. We ended up using this guide from @awesomerobot to get a banner that only shows on the home page. Not as fancy as theirs, but gets the job done!
And then used the Category Banners
The CSS tweaks were helpful for the color scheme of unread counts, etc.
