Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-188432-20140714194533

Now that the Cup is concluded, we should probably be thinking about making a transition to the "normal" state of the front page. The URL has already been transited to w:c:football, and I know from previous conversations that you guys want a wordmark that's essentially the same, but with a football in place of the WC logo and the word "football" in place of "world cup".

But what more do you want to do to move to a "normal" state? I think initially you guys had wanted to simply undo the WC changes and revert back to the pre-WC design. But my sense after having seen this design was that you were basically cool with it, and might retain the essence of it going forward.

Is that still a correct assessment?

If so, then this is probably what we need to source in this next week:


 * A new primary video — something fun and engaging that speaks to the culture of football — to replace Shakira
 * A new idea for the teams box, now populated by the World Cup team flags/groups.
 * Switching to a more general football news feed, rather than the World Cup one
 * A slight tweak to the language of — something from the perspective of "now that the WC is over" rather than "we'll be here after the WC is over"
 * An idea/programme for what do with . What is it going to be counting down to? The first match of the Premier League on 16 August seems logical to me, since this is the English language football wiki.  Or should we be concentrating on the US Major League Soccer games, since that season is currently under
 * A new background. Were we just going to pull the background you're currently using at Special:Forum?  If we just threw that onto a green background, I think that would probably work with minimal effort.

I think we can probably keep the Players, Managers, Venues and Confederations boxes, but just point them away from Brazilian categories to the more general ones. I don't even think we need to change the pics, really, since both the representative player and manager are famous icons, regardless of how the World Cup worked out for them. (That said, we certainly could change them with ease.)

And I think we can also keep the blog thing where it is. As long as you guys keep writing new blogs, it'll auto update.

The one thing I would like to add to the page, even if we currently have no information about it, is some kind of reference to the Women's World Cup in 2015. Even if it's as simple as a little 200px X 400px box in the right rail, saying, "Help us prepare for the next World Cup", I think we should make some attempt to get coverage of the women's side of the sport. That way, the wiki might get some traffic next year that it simply couldn't generate in its current, "men only" state today. 