Suggestions: Site Improvements

[ChaosInc]

These are just some suggestions to help ya out with the site based on my personal experience.

1) Get rid of all the redundant buttons in "Popular Catagories". From the layout of this section, it would give the impression that "Druids" are currently the most popular catagory then progress down the list as you go right, then down to the next row. Of course, this is not the case; it's just listed alphabetically.

Considering that you can get the class mods/macros by dropdown menus from the top links, you don't even really need these anyways. Personally, I'd just get rid of them entirely.

2) Reduce it down to 2 rows. 4 rows is just taking up screenspace and I'm pretty sure people aren't that interested in it THAT much. If you take the previous suggestion and ditch the class buttons entirely it would feed right into this one.

3) Take "Latest Mod Updates" and add some tabs/buttons to swap the frame for "Recently Added" and "Most Downloaded". Then remove those 2 from mods/more... buttons to shorten those dropdown menus, which leads to the next suggestion.

4) The "More..." button is currently a pain in the ass. Sorry, but it is. There are waaaay too many redundant links that make this far too long. All the classes are listed again, along with all the catagories that already have buttons right next to it. Plus if you don't have your screen just right it falls off the screen. I'd say just get rid of it entirely and just place another "Popular" button there.

5) Move "Latest Mod Updates" to the top above "Popular Catagories". This is the most looked for/seen thing on the site and should be easily accessible. This is not the supermarket; you shouldn't require people to pass through the junk food isle to reach the milk to try and get them to buy it. If people want to see what else is there, they'll look. Curiosity is great that way. If you're worried about the site not looking as "slick", you could always.....

6) Get rid of "Popular Catagories" entirely. First thing I think of when I see this is a poor attempt to try and copy curse.com, and I hated this "feature" over there as well. Honestly, people don't really care about what catagories are popular; they want to know mods are popular.

7) FFS the people need a "Forums" button. There isn't one in sight anywhere and really should've been present from the start. I'd change the "News" button to the "Forum" button with a dropdown menu with "News Archive", "Mod Forum", "Mod Dev Forum" and whatever other boards you'd want there.

If anything, this should be the first thing to change ASAP.

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I'm sure I'll think of more things along the way to suggest to help improve the layout and such to keep the masses appeased. But again, these are just my SUGGESTIONS, so please don't start replying with flames and such. If anyone wants to support/improve upon my suggestions, by all means do so. This is "our" site people. Let em know what you want rather than posting "ZOMFG, this site sucks ass now! I'm never coming here again!!!!!!" and not suggesting anything constructive other than the meager "I like the old site better".

The old site is not coming back. Get over it.

So let's help build this "beta" to fit our needs and desires.

I've rambled enough for now. :lipsrsealed:

8) Screenshots in the mod lists should be bigger. As of now you can't even make any sense of the images cause they're too small and since people try to look at those to get a quick idea of what the mod actually looks like/does, I think it would be beneficial to increase it's size a bit.

Of course it would make the frames a bit off-scale, so.....

9) Instead of making the mod listings across the screen, set them up as squares. I'd say 2-3 per row in this layout based on what size the frames would be.

Upper Left - Mod Title
Upper Right - Author
-----------
Left Side - Desc
Right Side - SS

[hypodave]

just one added thing I'd like to add,

On the individual mod/addon page can you add a small section where the mod author can put related mod/addons. For example "Guildbankaccount" addon is the client but the guild leader would be using "Guildbank", on the page there's no link and the only ways to find the relating mod/addon is to click the author name to see the other mod/addons they have made or to do a search.

[Rushster]

Thanks Chaos. It seems the popular categories thing is not so popular with you. We are in 2 minds with this as well. We posted it up because we wanted to see what the general reaction would be. I have not used Curse for mods for nearly 2 years so I have no idea what they have done, this just seemed logical for people who may not be so au fait with the modding community. None of the front page is set in stone as yet :)

Some good news for you , the forums are back up and linked from the top. The delay was down to reskinning the whole thing from scratch to fit the site.

[Phanx]

Opening:
I think the move to a new design was well-intentioned, and is overall cleaner than the old design. However, there are some major issues that currently make the new design very unusable for me, and some minor issues which I think could use improvement.

First:
I'm really disappointed by the fact that the new design wiped comments. Not only does this mean users will be asking the same questions that were already answered, but on one of my addons I had a couple of comments I'd gotten an email notification of while at work, only to come home and find that they no longer existed to reply to because the site had been switched over. :(

As well, the move to the new site corrupted any "special" characters in my addon descriptions.

Second:
For pages that don't exist, PLEASE don't just show me a blank page with nothing. Give me an error message. Give me a login page. Something. I have the "My Mods" page bookmarked, because when I visit this site, that's where I want to go first. However, I set my browser to delete cookies when I close it, which means that I'm not logged in when I come back to the site -- so coming to the "My Mods" URL just gives me a blank white screen with no feedback. The old site gave me a page which allowed me to log in.

Third:
Another color scheme would be nice. The current dark greenish color always makes me think my monitor's color is badly off. The color scheme is also very difficult to read for those of us who don't have perfect vision. Currently in order to comfortably use the site, I have to zoom in to 160% (yay for Opera). With the old site, it was readable and usable at 100% zoom.

For me, this is a huge issue, and is why I stopped using Curse when they transitioned to their light-gray-on-lighter-gray layout with tiny fonts.

Fourth:
There are too many clicks to get to addons from searches. The snippet of description shown in the search results list is enough -- when I click on an addon, I just want to go to the addon's page, not see a bigger snippet of description.

Same with macros -- when I click on a macro, I just want to go to its page. Also on macros, I don't like the tabbed interface, especially as I'm usually more interested in the macro itself than in the poster's description of what the macro does. Since neither macro descriptions nor macros are generally very long, I don't think it would be unreasonable to show both.

Fifth:
As I posted in another thread, the search box behaves very oddly in Opera. I can't click on most of it (just a tiny section toward the right end), and Opera doesn't recognize it as a search box. Normally, I can right-click on a search box to create a new Opera search, which then enables me to type, for example, "wui keyword" in the address bar to search wowUI for "keyword".

Sixth:
I like the improvements to the addon admin interface, in general. However, splitting the screen into two columns, one with a list of my addons, the other with the actual admin interface, makes everything much smaller than it needs to be. I don't think the addon list is necessary at all (I can always use my back button to return to the addon list), but it wouldn't be a problem if it were slimmed down to a third or even a quarter of the width.

Seventh:
I miss the "older changes" section. For addons that are frequently updated, it made it easy to keep recent changes visible for users who may not update every time an update is posted, while keeping the regular "changelog" section from filling up an entire screen.

The "slash commands" section was nice too. Many authors didn't make use of it, but I think it made it much cleaner to keep a full list of commands out of the main addon description, especially for larger or more complex addons.

Finally:
There is no longer a link to the X-Code help page. Every site uses slightly different formatting codes, and it's nice to not have to try to remember whether this one uses, for example, [url] or [link], or to have to try one and then change it if it uses the other. Same goes for list formats, etc.

Edit to add:
The old Favorites page was perfect. It showed me the addon's name, last update, and buttons to download it or remove it as a favorite. The new Favorites page is awful. It shows me a ton of information I don't need to see about addons I've already marked as favorites. Such clutter includes the addon's description, screenshot, rating, download statistics, and localization status. There are no buttons to quickly download the addon, or remove it from my favorites. There's a great deal more scrolling required, especially at the aforementioned 160% size to make the site readable for me. As well, it suffers from the same problem as search results -- when I click on something in the list, I just want to go to the addon's page, not see an expanded preview. :(

[Telic]

1.) It would be nice to be able to add a caption/annotation to AddOn pictures to help describe what people are meant to be seeing.
A short cut for this would be to simply use the picture's file name as the picture's caption, to appear above the picture when viewing it, or as the picture's tooltip in preview mode.

2.) Would it be possible to split the Dependencies in to Mandatory & Optional ?
I try to make sure my AddOns are stand alone with no mandatory dependencies, but at the same time I like to make them compatible with as many other AddOns as possible.....

Otherwise, thanks for all the hard work. We appreciate it :)

[Elly]

Phanx & Telic,

I've merged yours with one of the existing threads with suggestions.

[Wodgar]

"Latest Mod Updates" is much more important to see than the "Popular Categories" boxes so maybe move the Categories section below the Updates... ?
(A profiles option to dispense with the Popular Categories section completely would be best for me)

Also, getting an error when trying to log out of the wowui.incgamers.com main page.
Using Internet Explorer v6.0.2900.2180.xpsp_sp2_gdr.050301-1519
So now my public library has me logged in here permanently !

Don't blame me if some cheeky octagenarian spams you with Porn :embarassed:

[Telic]

I like the dedicated My Mods page, and especially the fact that you can see the latest comment. Perhaps the prefix could be a different coloured text however, so that your eyes can immediately find the start of the comment itself ?
( Using Italics for the comment itself just doesn't cut the mustard ;)

Also, sadly, the phrase "This author accepts PayPal donations" should perhaps be re-phrased to say "This author CAN accept PayPal donations" :cry:
[Joking btw :tongue:]

Maybe this thread should be sticky if all new suggestions (as opposed to bugs) are being merged in to it ? :wink:

[rgirty]

White text on a black background is probably the most singular annoying feature of any website IMO.

I wont' be coming here much, but since we are adding suggestions a different color scheme for the text/background would be beneficial and easier on the eyes IMO.

If the normal forums went to this layout I would have to abandon it. I post commonly in excess of 30 posts a day and read many many more threads than that and simply don't have the financial resources to supply the pain medication that would be needed to relieve myself of the tremendous headache that this would cause.

[Tunga]

I have to say I agree with rgirty: I much prefer to standard black on biege with red trim from the main forums, to this white on green with gold trim. I tried changing my forum skin setting but it's not applied to the UI forums.

[Rushster]

The text is not actually white. It is toned down for that very reason. Perhaps it needs toning down a little more. I'll see what people think en-mass :)

[rgirty]

"toned down" meaning it would be darker?

If so, a very dark background will have a darker shade of text placed upon it?

For hundreds if not thousands of years books and reading material have used black fonts on white background. Before people start bringing in other issues, Ebooks are in this fashion as well and ebooks could easily be changed to be any color desired but are not.

Large commercial news sites are not white on black, there is a reason for it.

It is terrible. When one looks away from the screen a type of "visual residue" remains in the field of vision.

Much like staring at a red object will make everything else appear to have a greenish hue when finally looking up from teh object when I look away from this website I can still see the letters burned into my sockets like a bad case of CRT burn-in.

Please consider changing it, for the sake of people who want to post here.

[Telic]

Actually, I don't mind the light text on dark background, although I think it could be fine tuned to be a little easier on the eyes. And yes rgirty, making the text slightly darker, (OR the background slightly lighter) could be the way to do it.

The WORST web page colour choices for light text on a dark background are the Ultra-high contrast ones, such as bright yellow text on a rich navy blue background. Now that really gives a migraine.

Interestingly, another AddOn site that recently changed its site design, chose a dark text on light background - and so many people complained that they had to introduce a "Theme" drop down box so people could choose a Dark scheme with light text as an option. (i.e. the infamous version 3 of curse-gaming)

Basically, no matter whether you choose light text on a dark background, or dark on light, its still important to settle on a reasonable level of contrast. But dark on light is probably easier to get right :wink:

If I could change anything about the text it would be the terrible gothic style font used in the forum buttons. Yuk :tongue:

[Xinh]

If I could change anything about the text it would be the terrible gothic style font used in the forum buttons. Yuk
I concur. The font used on the forum buttons ("Reply", ",", etc) really looks cheesy. It makes the buttons very visible and not in a good way. A cleaner font would help as many of fonts seen on the site (using stock browser setups like the default Firefox 2.0.0.6 build which seems to use Arial) are of a "clean" type of font (Arial in my case). Speaking from a design background (I have done website design and layout plus logo development and my wife is a TV graphics designer), it is better to have a unified set of fonts for a site, not several different types. That helps make a big difference from a professional looking site and a site put together with Tripod's Site Builder.

Regarding site colors, I do not have any big issues with the site colors, however others do. Perhaps it may be time to consider a "UI.WorldofWar.Net Classic" skin using the old's site color scheme. You would have to reskin the image based buttons with the skin's background color however compared to the Curse site that should not be too much of a hassle. My two EuroCents worth.

[ChaosInc]

Have to agree with the button font changes. Makes me think that I'm staring at a D&D page, which obvious I'm not.

[geojlc]

I like the new compact look of the first page. I also love all the news stories you post about wow. What I really really don't like is the whole "after the break" thing in the news stories. I was interested enough to click on the article in the first place, I would really rather have the whole thing available instead of needing to click again to finish reading it. Most of the time, I don't click again and so rarely read the whole article...

[bacobaar]

I like the new compact look of the first page.

Where's the shoutbox ?

[Maticus]

What I really really don't like is the whole "after the break" thing in the news stories. I was interested enough to click on the article in the first place, I would really rather have the whole thing available instead of needing to click again to finish reading it. Most of the time, I don't click again and so rarely read the whole article...

That's a very good point, the break is to preserve space on the front page of the main WoW site, you shouldn't see it if you actually click on a news item and it's the only news there.

[Lothaer]

Where's the shoutbox ?

there is a issue with the shout box and it has been temporarily removed.