Redesigning and re-branding EN World

[William Ronald]

Morrus,

I like the menus on the left. I doubt you will have everyone agree on everything. So, use your best judgement.

A site map might be good for those people with older browsers.

 

[Morrus]

I can't seem to fix either of the menu problems - the banner-in-the-way issue or the left-menu-freezing issue. Don't know if that's because I did something wrong or because the script's shoddy. If I can't fix that, though, I won't be using it.

 

[sawyer0413]

Website Redesign

Morrus,

While you may have seen this already referenced, I would strongly recommend Jakob Nielsen's excellent books (2) on website redesign. I think once you take a look at those (Designing Web Usability and Homepage Usability), you might come away with some different ideas.

Forgive me for being unspecific otherwise. I can not write a better treatise on your website than he has already done, and you would be much better served reading his books. I'd recommend Homepage Usability if you could only read one.

I wish you all the luck in the world. Your webpage (and Eric's before it), is part of my daily routine. I'll look forward to the changes as time goes on.

Feel free to contact me directly if you would like more specifics. I'd be glad to give my input. But I would not think this forum would be the proper place to continue that discussion.

Best Regards,
Bill Sawyer

 

[SamSpectre]

Interface

I was unable to see any drop down menus with my browser (OmniWeb for Mac OS X). I guess I'll have to grab Mozilla or something if I want to read ENWorld from now on.

 

[thomkt]

The drop down page

My wife designs websites (no, not little piddley things, she's done work for Intel, Nike and The GAP, to name a few), and she likes the second one. It's less cluttered.

It'll take a little while to get used to what's under which dropdown.

- Kyle

 

[Gargoyle]

Thumbs up. I like the less cluttered look.

 

[Grraf]

not another resizer...

Hmm. A lot of people post without bothering to read (it's a bad habit of mine to from time to time. Of course if you're reading this then you probably already got that)

dropdown 2 looks very good.

I have a lower bandwith connection and thre thoughts/requests:
1. PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T RESIZE. A number of sites have started either focing auto-reload periodically or reloading the whole page every single time you adjust the size of the window.
[it may be that this resizing is somehow nessessary but I've seen some pretty complex sites that do take a second to change themselves after you've changed the window size but without actually forcing a whole new reload.]
[also I'll sometimes click through to a banner after I'm done reading. I went to Oathbound that way, for example. If the ad keeps changing I think the odds of that are a bit less. Though I suppose you can tell advertisers that they'll be getting "more exposure" with the new enforced downloading thing.]

2. I think people should be able to get to what they want with a minimal amount of clicking. I would be thrilled if you remembered that
a. downloading pure text (i.e. news bits) requires about no bandwith.
b. pictures (especially your banner ads) download slowly. forcing people to load them over and over again is kinda a pain in the butt.

3. Many readers don't check daily. You occasionally update a page twice in one day. Put the last five days of news up.
Forcing people to click through to get data (ala Mistwell) is pretty irritating and unessessary. You already seem to have a good sense of what's important enough that everybody see it (today's comments from Ryan D. for example) and what deserves a blurb and a link.

I've also seen the "jamming" issue on dropdown2's menus (mentioned above). I'm sure it can be corrected, maybe an enWorlder with some html could glance at the source?

Tabs are useful when (like hotmail or amazon) you have a limited number of choices. In the name of not having to navigate through lots and lots of pages to get what you want I think the current way is best. Plus enWorld servers don't have to feed you all that data and grafics you don't need.

Last comment: Put reviews somewhere with the world reviews. Calling it the D20 system guild is pretty confusing. I always putz around for a while before remembering that that's what its called. Especially since there are a WotC products in there. They aren't D20 products.... they're D&D as are certain other products like Kenzer and co.

cheers

 

[EdD]

Bits of feedback...

1) The menus are nice, but I dont see the JavaScript menus adding much, usability wise. To be honest, I prefer what you have right now - everything listed on the left. This lets a visitor see what's available on the site immediately, without having to purposely inspect the menus. But, if you do go with the menus, I thought the left-side option was nicer.

2) I find light text on a black background to be very difficult on the eyes. I have trouble using the site more than a few minutes at a time because of this. I know not everyone agrees, but I'm sure a lot of people do.

3) For the articles and news, I'd like to see shorter headlines that link to full articles. Much the way online newspapers do it. It'd be easier to survey what's new at a glance, and probably cut down on the overall bandwidth.

 

[mindqwerk]

Morrus,

Great idea, applying a new menu system to clean up the link navigation (If those were the only two choices I would go with #2).

If you end up changing color schemes, or drastically change the look, lemme know and I'll update/redo the logo.

 

[Mistwell]

Reducing the news to links is good

Morrus is not happy with the thought that his site is considered a "news" site.

However, when you go the site, 90% of the words on the front page are news.

Is it any surprise that people consider this a news site? It isn't to me.

To solve this, all you have to do is give the same attention to the news as you do to all other content on this site. All other content, other than news, is a short description with a link.

It also isn't a coicidence that all sites I know of, that have won any awards, or that are from major content providers, also have a short description of news with a link to the full story. That's how you do a news item without a lot of clutter.

In fact, go look at any news site. Check out cnn.com, cnbc.com, msnbc.com, foxnews.com, yahoo.com. You will find that they ALL give a short description and a link, NOT the full article, on the front page.

Go check out any well-known fan-site as well. Check out some sports sites, like http://www.nba.com/ , or http://msn.espn.go.com/main.html . Check out the major comic book sites, or business sites, or even business-collapse sites like f*ckedcompany.com . All of them give you a short description, with a link to the full story.

That's why this site looks so cluttered all the time. I mean go look at the front page right now. You have reams of news all over it. Ryan Dancey's comment takes up an entire page of text by itself, yet many people may not care what Ryan has to say about Polite Use of the Open Gaming License. But if you do care, why can't you just click on the news item to pull up the entire article with the entire message?

If a change isn't made with the new site design, you will once again be dooming this site to a "industry news site" reputation. When almost everything you see when you go to the site is a news item, your natural conclusion will be to think of this place as a news site. However, if news were treated like all other content, with a short description and a link, then you would be portraying the actual content of the board in a more fair, representative manner.