Page Text: Main Pages for Fandom
Main Pages are the central points to focus on for many communities. They are often, but not always, popular landing pages where readers enter a community (and the greater Fandom network). They create the first impression for some visitors, and are the navigational crossroads for others. However, there is a lot of tradition around Main Pages that may not be ideal choices for today's wikis.
One thing that takes getting used to is that Main Pages are not nearly as "main" as many think they are. In fact, Main Pages might be the most popular pages on some communities but are very far down the list of others. With global search engines pointing to individual articles on a wiki, Main Pages are often not the primary "entrance" into a community's a…
Mira Laime • 26 July 2019
11
The best possible local navigation bar
Did you know that 99.95% of the people on Fandom are readers, not editors? Admins tend to focus almost exclusively on the needs of their fellow editors, since readers leave no visible trace. Yet while wikis can’t exist without editors, their content is useful and enjoyable to a far larger audience. Many more people rely on the content you create and appreciate your work than you might have thought. It’s crucial that you keep this in mind when organizing your wiki’s local navigation bar, to make it as useful to your audience as possible.
(Can’t be bothered to read all this? Jump to the bottom for a summary!)
Fandom’s User Experience Research team has looked into how users typically move around on a wiki and where they click (and where they don…