As salaamu ‘alaykum

Alhamdulillah, after some hard work, several iterations, and plenty of tea we are excited to announce (in case you missed it yesterday) the new SunniPath homepage. Here are some of the new features and some of the thinking behind it all:

1. Aesthetics -
1. As we mentioned in the New Course Catalog System post we are switching to a new yellow color scheme.
2. Some new visual styles to give a balanced classic Islam/modern look.
3. For added barakah we managed to fit in a spot for a snippet of ancient texts (5 brownie points to the first person that can correctly identify the text currently up)
2. What We Do - Because the homepage is where most new users come to learn about SunniPath we wanted to give a very clear message about what we do and what we have to offer. To do that we added:
1. A “take a look around” section with a brief description of some of the services. Insha’Allah once the Library is back up we’ll add a section there.
2. More articles on the top left about who we are and what we offer
3. A brief writeup on the bottom to describe what we do (needs some touch up…)
4. Links to Recorded Events - a very popular request for return users and new visitors to get a glimpse into our courses
3. Integrate with Blog - We launched our blog a couple months back but without much integration and publicity. Now that we are starting to use our blog more so we decided to connect our homepage with the blog:
1. Make the announcements come from the latest announcement posts from our blog
2. Latest blog posts - you can now see what’s new with our blog from
   the homepage (not 100% integrated just yet, but insha’Allah soon)
3. We added “Blog” to the top navigation bar
4. Return Users - To make the homepage work better for return users we:
1. Made the “Latest Answers” section bigger with a bigger title and bigger fonts for each question to quickly keep up with the Answers
2. When you log in students will see links to course policies and orientation info for quick access
5. Usability - We’re putting a lot of work to make the site more user friendly. See the catalog blog post above to see how.
6. Flexible Layout - Our new 3 column section gives us flexibility to add all types of content. Soon after the homepage was added we put it’s flexibility to use with our new ChipIn donation drive widget that we have for New Muslims (more to come about this).

Insha’Allah we will be constantly working on improving the aesthetics, usability and usefulness of the site. We hope you find all current and future changes beneficial. If you have any suggestions do leave a comment and let us know.
was salaam