Many moons ago I asked @dan how he would approach remaking the MacMost site in Elements (see How to Design This?). He came up with a video that was pretty direct and to the point, and useful to my understanding of a few things.
That was a relatively simple example and was more based on card creation than CMS. I think it’s time for @dan to show how he’d approach a more complex site design, and one that would pull up from the CMS. I nominate MacRumors as the candidate, as it has a wide range of things going on in its above-the-fold area, and it features a non-rounded design that requires borders and backgrounds to keep things distinguished.
I believe that Elements users, particularly those trying to understand how to get into the anything-goes nature of its design abilities, benefit from seeing how someone who really knows Elements approaches the problems of building out more than a Landing Page type site.
All those sites you suggest would be better choices for Scrollyplay or Scrollytelling to do a video on how to create. Moreover, they’re all essentially theatrics and gymnastics on top of a simple landing page foundation. I’m not sure what that would help a new-to-Elements user understand.
My requests have been about helping new users take something they’ve probably encountered and seeing how to build the foundation of that, which is why I suggested MacRumors designed with the CMS. This is exactly the point at which I see many new-to-Elements users getting stuck. Flying animations and the sorts of things you’re pointing to are creative decisions (or at least they should be), and tend to live on top of a site’s foundation. I’m not sure that trying to show how to be creative is all that easy to do, to start with.
That’s a fair point, but it could be equally argued that MacRumors is simply a large news site based on a robust CMS (Wordpress), which is far more suitable foundation for this type of site (hence why they use it).
Ideally, I see no reason why both site types couldn’t be featured.
But, perhaps after that!