You may have noticed that we've had a bit of a change on our home page and games index page. We thought that this was a good time to have a gaze back into the mists of time and see how the English Banana.com home page has changed over the years.
Do you remember any of these...?
Fig. 1 - 2003
This was one of our earliest home page layouts, when there wasn't that much content on the site. We owe a debt of gratitude to these unknown faces (whose pictures came from a stock pictures CD-ROM) for lending our site a certain air of gravitas and studiousness. (Especially the older chap who wasn't even looking at the camera.)
This page had the familiar title and links that has been with the site since it started in 2002 and would continue on the home page until last year. Also prominent are banners for Channel Z Television (our first site) and Sites for Teachers, who really helped us to get off the ground with lots of great traffic that has continued to this day! Note the links for adding to favourites and making us your home page - which also helped us to become established as people saved our bookmark and starting coming back again and again...
Fig. 2 - 2004
As the content on our site grew - look, we've got up to 600+ free printable worksheets already! - so the home page menu had to grow. We added a search box, which seemed like a good idea, and stuck with the same people in the pictures, who had done such a sterling job (although the chap in the top right-hand corner had to make way for a featured link). There are still no ads on the home page and we think that the yellow and salmon pink went quite well together. It must be early in 2004 because we've still got our Christmas message on the home page...
Fig. 3 - 2005
Again, as the number of features on the site grew, we needed a bigger - and better - menu on the home page. We feel that this was really the classic home page layout and design for our home page. It's neat, looks nice and does the job well. We kept the theme of having smiling faces - bringing back our old friend from 2003, and adding a new face, plus some people walking away into the sunset (why?) - and added the "What's New?" link, which linked to our blog (version #1) that kept readers up to date with site news and additions. We also wanted to show how long we'd been online. Four years seemed like a big achievement back then... Still no ads on the home page!
Fig. 4 - 2006
Er, what happened here? Did we really put this online as the home page? This was back in the era when the games section of our site was starting to get popular. Can you tell that we wanted people to play our games? In hindsight this is an awful design, but there's a homely note with the "Thanks to Jennifer..." message. The rest of the menu (as of 2005) continues below the fold, i.e. the bit that you have to scroll to see it.
Fig. 5 - 2007
This is from early last year and is the first time that we can see an ad. It's quite a nice layout, with text making it clear (for visitors and for the search engines) what the site is all about, and it's clear what we were offering: "750+ Free Printable Worksheets...", the games, and the free books. Everything that is still available now on the site. But we feel that it lacked a little sparkle, or passion, if you will. There are no pictures - apart from the ad - and the whole thing looks a bit, well, functional.
We added the RSS and XML buttons, which we thought made the site look a tiny bit Web 2.0. Well, OK, it probably looked more like Web 1.4, but we were trying...! We were still using the original menu bar that we began with in late 2002, but this page looks a bit boring compared to the 2005 version, don't you think?
Fig. 6 - 2008 (1st version)
This was a bit more radical because we completely changed the menu bar, squeezing and squishing it to make it thinner. This was mainly to give us more room on the page above the fold but it also gave us something to do on a wet Saturday afternoon!
We liked this version because it had room for loads of feature links, a banner ad, and a kind of picture that laid out our main offer: 1. Plan (EB Schools planning materials), 2. Teach (free worksheets), 3. Raise Funds (our copying licence). This summed up what the site was all about, and there was also room for visitors landing on the site to see that they could download our books. We added the new Javascript menu bar, which was created to make it easier for visitors to find all of the site's features, which had grown in number quite considerably since it began in 2002.
However, it was still a bit blocky and text-based and we wanted something more fun for our users and more flexible for us to be able to flag up new things on the site (plus we just fancied a bit of a change), so - drum roll, please - the new home page was born... (Note to self: can a web page be born?)
Fig. 7 - 2008 (2nd version)
It's our most radical re-design yet, but we're pleased with it and we hope that you like it too. We've got links to all of the best content on the site above the fold, along with two picture blocks, on the left, that we can change any time we want to tell you about great new features on the site.
Two important features are back, back BACK above the fold! The search box and the "Add as home page..." link. Why are they important? Well, the search box helps visitors to quickly find what they're looking for, and the "home page" bit encourages them to keep on returning time and again. We should have featured these above the scroll all along... oh well, we should never stop learning!
We think that today English Banana.com looks more fun and welcoming at first glance, and if you scroll down you can still find all of the links to download our books... and if you keep on scrolling you can find a distant relative of the menu that we first used way back in 2005 (Fig. 3). How we've grown since then! And, whether you are a student or a teacher of English, we're sure that you have too...
If you have any comments about our re-design or about the site in general we'd love to hear from you. Click here to contact us today!
