Navigation and page layout
Nov 15, 2021 Booklet update
Welcome to my weekly-ish update about building Bookl.et!
What’s Booklet?
Booklet is a better Google Groups. The app has a discussion forum, announcements, and a member directory. It’s a place for for communities, networks, and companies to communicate in a calm, asynchronous way.
What have I accomplished since the last update?
I’ve been working on the page layout and navigation of the app! Check out the video below for a quick demo:
(New here? Consider starting with my previous demo video for more context!)
The good news is that I got the navigation built how I want it to, including some cool animations as you click buttons. However, I’m not happy with how big the sidebar is, and how the experience feels on mobile phones. So, I’m going to try rebuilding the navigation to use a top navigation instead of a side navigation.
What’s next?
Finishing the navigation and application layout with a side navigation
Starting to build the forum so that people can post a message to the group
How you can help ⬇️
Thanks for all of the thoughts last week about Slack and Discord! No asks this week.
Other thoughts ☁️
This article about why you should use forums instead of Slack resonated with me! It’s really hard to set up a proper forum today without installing software on a server. I hope Booklet can make starting a forum as easy as making a Slack or Notion group.
I’m considering adding the ability for a group to be public or private. This would help groups that want their content to be visible to anybody on the internet - such as a developer forum. Plus, it would help search engines find Booklet!
Here’s my latest thinking on pricing for Booklet in the future
Sizzy.co is one of my favorite tools for building responsive websites - it lets you see a website in multiple different sizes like this:
Thanks 🙏