Replace carousel with /testimonials

[mroderick]

Towards the bottom of the front page, there's a carousel with testimonials

Instead of using a carousel, I propose that we create a dedicated page for testimonials at /testimonials.

See: https://shouldiuseacarousel.com

[KimberleyCook]

I've wanted to remove this for ages!!! 😂

I saw this example on the homepage of another website and loved it (so took the screenshot), and then I want the stories to go to their own page. Not each story have their own page but a page dedicated to stories like you've mentioned. I think they're a lot more personal than just testimonials.

I will need to source these stories but I'm 100% up for removing the bloody carousel 😂 this could be something I do when I'm back from maternity leave next month :)

[mroderick]

@KimberleyCook are you happy for me to move the existing carousel on to its own page under /testimonials for now, and we can figure out how to improve that later?

[KimberleyCook]

What would be the benefit of doing this? It would be a shame to have nothing like this on the homepage

[matyikriszta]

@mroderick I think what @KimberleyCook meant in her previous comment is that she is happy to remove the carousel but we do want to keep some testimonials on the homepage. So migrate the carousel to a grid of cards like you see in her example. I think instead of sourcing brand new quotes we could showcase some of our codebar stories podcast guests with a quote and their photo and link the card to the podcast episode? @KimberleyCook what do you think? Either way, we need fresh content for this section but we do want to keep in the homepage.

[mroderick]

What would be the benefit of doing this?

In my opinion, the homepage should be a fast loading starting point, in order to quickly give the visitor a good idea of what site they're visiting and what they can expect to find. Kind of like the giant map with a well worn "you are here" red dot :)

I'm looking for opportunities to make the homepage leaner, both in terms of its impact on the server, but also for the visitors. As a visitor of the homepage, how likely is it that you're looking for testimonials? Does it really need to load five random ones from the database for every visit?

While we figure out how to make the testimonials work better than the current carousel, I think we can move them to a different page, and visitors can benefit from having a leaner homepage.

[matyikriszta]

@mroderick in my personal opinion social proof, testimonials in this case, is an important part of making a decision whether to attend codebar. Most of our new members find us via word of mouth (people recommending us to their friends), this our way to showcase some of those recommendations on our website. We want the homepage to be lean, yes, but we also want to tell a story. I think it's less likely that visitors will go looking for a testimonials page. I feel our navigation is already overloaded so I'm not sure where we would even put a link to this page.

We have a grand total of 5 testimonials so we are not loading 5 random ones from the database, or rather we are loading 5 of the same testimonials each time. These could very well be hard coded into the HTML, I don't think these event need to be persisted into a database. That should save us one query.