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Sometimes I think that designing can also be like playing LEGO. Give me the pieces, the shapes, the blocks, and I’ll do my best to arrange them into something cool yet usable.

So, this is the list of the various blocks that would fit into an online magazine’s home page. I definitely would use this as reference, and hopefully it’s useful for you guys too.

First, the obvious ones:

• Title and description
• Navigation bar
• Search Form
• Footer

Next, the custom blocks:

• Featured article. A big, differentiated block with big images and excerpt of the magazine’s current top article
• Also featured/previously featured articles. Could be a list of three or more articles with smaller thumbnails, smaller header, and so forth, compared to the single, featured article above.
• A glimpse of the most recent articles on each categories available. Mostly just list of titles with date of publication.
• Popular articles. Either visit count-based or reader rating-based.
• Multimedia. Featured video, podcast, and so forth.
• Latest reader comments.
• Advertising spot(s).
• List of categories.
• List of archives based on date.

Also remember that the above are just common blocks and they might very well be modified to fit your needs. Why just one featured article, for example? Maybe six is the way to go. Who knows.

Another point of interest is thinking how these blocks can be presented. Use DOMTab to put more than one blocks in one space, displaying only one block but still allowing visitors view the other blocks by clicking on the corresponding tabs (it’s much easier to check the DOMTab site and see the effect in action). You can see this effect being used tastefully on The New York Times, Small Potato’s magazine-styled WordPress theme, and basically various other places.

It’s probably a good thing as well to feature your readers somewhere on the front page. A list of the most valued contributors of some sort (those who comment the most, or who send the most articles, and so on). There are plenty of different things to try, so experiment and have a lot of fun!