theyworkforyou
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mysociety
Improve design of the topics button
We have the ability to highlight one or more Topics pages on the TWFY homepage, but at the moment this just displays as a small blue button. Can the Design team jujz it up a it please?
Thoughts: This is the gateway to the Topics pages, which were built as a result of our youth outreach, during which those surveyed indicated that they accessed politics via topics, not debates or MPs. So ideally we need a solution that draws people in, perhaps with a pictorial element, and calls out top anyone who's particularly interested in one of the topics at hand.
Here’s something I was just playing about with, based on CSS background-images via the /topic/image.php?id=foobar endpoint and background-size: cover.
If we want to use these images for this purpose, we’ll need to replace them with non-darkened versions. Incidentally, this also explains to me why the Topic page headers look so dark – they’re darkened images that are being darkened further by the webpage CSS.
These look a lot better - but tbh the Topics pages need a bit of attention before we start pointing people there. Specifically the 'parliamentary business' sections which are manually compiled and haven't been looked at for a year... :/ Oops, maybe that was my job?
I think the solution to that (ie topics not being regularly updated) is probably a weekly calendar reminder to add significant debates to these pages. More than weekly will be a bit too much of a burden; less than weekly means that stuff like the Meaningful Vote debates don't get added to Brexit until long after they happened.
Obviously I could subscribe to alerts for the topic words, but I don't think I'm up to alerts on 'Brexit' (and the quantity would be so high I'd have to click through anyway).