When I entered the site I thought it had crashed again.
The white and grey background looks like the Wii menu screen and just as minimalist and boring, there seems to be less space for site info and more for adverts and the main page layout is so cluttered it looks like a social networking site rather than a list of comics.
Still, good to have the comic description back, although I only got it to work on the most favourited.
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Comic Talk and General Discussion *
Sneak Peak
This is pretty…well awful. The site was already fairly slow, normally, but this new design has made it even slower. It's far too image-heavy. Not to mention the fact that there's no happy medium with your layout. You either get assaulted with advertising on every conceivable square inch of space, or you block those ads and wind up with massive amounts of wide open space that is glaringly bright, due to the fact that it's ALL WHITE.
And if this new layout is still being worked on, why did you implement it? Rule one of the most basic web designing is that you don't start using the new layouts and pages until they're 100% done. You could've just as easily set up a secondary site to test out the new layout and see what people thought before going ahead and slapping it up here, despite the fact that not many people seem to like it, if any. Not only does that indicate poor workmanship from the design perspective, but it indicates a lack of respect or even interest in your clients' (us) opinions.
Hurray I return… But with terrible news. I am afraid that I am not pleased with the templates. News and reading (in my opinion) should always be a focal point of a website, and heavy images take ages to load when you are on a slow network. Beyond that I seem to remember this site having trouble with bandwidth issues when I was still massing up my hits, this sites new layout isn't going to improve this issue. Another issue I am having is that your Javascript takes forever to load the information from your user profile. It would of been easier to go with a Javascript library like mootools, lightbox, or prototype to smooth out the kinks in the pages loading abillity. The last problem I am having is that the site looks like its just floating out in space without any form of containment, as if it could all seemingly come undone at any minute. If you want a quick fix to this it would be easy to add in a background and a border to accompany the rest of the page [stripes 2.0 might fit this site well.]
I sincerely think the new design looks more clean and professional. But it also feels like too many images with too little text. I don't know what I'm looking at until my mouse is over it. And there's not much of a place for my eyes to rest.
And it feels like 45% of what we're looking at is advertisements. In fact, it feels like advertisements are cleverly surrounding out content and closing in on it, ready to kill it at any time. I want to feel like the content is king here at Drunk Duck.
I like being able to filter what the front gives me. I also like the fact that you can hover and get information. All the nice info and filters for my favorites list is cool too.
Aside from that the old design was much better.
The biggest annoyances to me (that I didn't see mentioned) are the shortcut buttons to the stats and upload pages are missing. And comics I assist on are not in my list of comics.
I also dislike the news not being on the front.
If I had to choose between the pros of this new site design (as it stands now) and the old one I'd still choose the old one.
I hope this is up to get instant feedback that will be addressed with much haste. At which point when the new design it "somewhat" acceptable I then hope this new mold makes it quicker to fix the bugs.
I mean heck, I would be willing to pay a monthly fee for the services here if it sped things up and such. The service is most valuable. I'm gonna stick with the optimistic view that many things will be addressed soon.
it looks like some teen magazine threw up on my screen. It's too busy, too white and nothing is compartmentalized.
As for everyone's dislikes, I agree with them. as for their suggestions… one way to get rid of the stark white contrasted with the technicolor vomit of all the images would be to used a segmented background, blocking off each area with a different color… also, some sort of modifier that slightly mutes the brightnes of each icon/thumbnail until you mouse over it.
There is something to be said for simplicity. I myself prefer the old old style of DD that was blue and white w/ a bit of orange trim here and there. Sure there were things wrong with it, but it was visually the most elegant and professional looking. The new one looks like someone's photobucket gallery or an image heavy geocities site…. (Remember those? DX )
Anyway, that's my two cents.
I am not one of those that's in crazy-hate over the new design, but the thing that REALLY BURNS ME UP is the loss of some of the essential functionality of the site.
Specifically, the chore that it now is to access my favorites is just not something I'm excited about. The accessiblity and ease of function of the favorites list was my number one favorite thing about DD…and it's been ruined.
Shift that puppy up the page, don't make me click on it to drop it down and give me back my same-screen editing function. Please. I'm begging you. I can't imagine visiting the site on a regular basis the way it is now.
And…put me down as another person upset that the top comics are no longer divided into two. As a person who is FAR more interested in strips on the web, mainly seeing full pages in the top ten is discouraging and not very useful.
And where's the news? That should be on the front page, no question about it. Now, it might as well not be there.
Basically, accessibility has been lost.
I know the site designers are gonna get a world of crap thrown at them this week for this, but overall I think the site is headed in the right direction. The ability to see a list of all past featured comics is great. So is the idea of multiple, editable lists on the front page. The popout comic descriptions are also quite nice.
But there are some bugs. There are some real issues here. Some of the essential charm and functionality of DD has been taken away. I hope it can be restored.
Hey all,
The new design has a lot of thumbnails on the main page, and yes it has a lot of 'white' plainness. I personally like moving more towards plain, but if it turns out that it needs some more visual scaffolding so be it, we'll impliment something like that… however, the thumbnails were actually the driving force for this. There is no plan to re-impliment text in place of thumbnails.
All of our monitoring dictates that few readers actually visit the main page, and of those that do, few care of anything other than the image that is shown. So while the text lists SEEM to be important to some, in reality they go unused and ignored. The thumbnails are a way to encourage people to look into other comics… hopefully by artwork enticing them… a text link doesn't grab attention so much.
Unfortunately there are still plenty of design tweaks to be done that will continue ongoing. Whether the sidebar will remain from page to page remains to be seen.
The biggest difficulty in taking anybodys criticism right now is it's very polarized, and I end up hearing the same people cheering for the old design that rued it when it was first implimented. Unfortunately that makes it really hard to take seriously.
I do appreciate Nick and Co. who present simple bulletpoint lists of things they like, dislike, and would like to see changed.
However, bear in mind that the new design is the direction we're heading, even if it's not ultimately the end result. We need to feature the thumbnails, not the titles of comics.
Hang in there for now, and try to keep your posts succinct and helpful as possible, because it becomes very hard to keep up, respond, and even impliment anything if it becomes a giant nest of ranting.
The ad placement vs. the profile stuff I dont' think is horrible, but I agree that it's not IDEAL. Ideally the only thing that would show up is profile and never any ads. Right now we're trying to figure out the best way to present ads in a way that can co-exist with other content.
Forums aesthetics are on my agenda to correct.
I am not one of those that's in crazy-hate over the new design, but the thing that REALLY BURNS ME UP is the loss of some of the essential functionality of the site.
Specifically, the chore that it now is to access my favorites is just not something I'm excited about. The accessiblity and ease of function of the favorites list was my number one favorite thing about DD…and it's been ruined.
Shift that puppy up the page, don't make me click on it to drop it down and give me back my same-screen editing function. Please. I'm begging you. I can't imagine visiting the site on a regular basis the way it is now.
And…put me down as another person upset that the top comics are no longer divided into two. As a person who is FAR more interested in strips on the web, mainly seeing full pages in the top ten is discouraging and not very useful.
And where's the news? That should be on the front page, no question about it. Now, it might as well not be there.
Basically, accessibility has been lost.
I know the site designers are gonna get a world of crap thrown at them this week for this, but overall I think the site is headed in the right direction. The ability to see a list of all past featured comics is great. So is the idea of multiple, editable lists on the front page. The popout comic descriptions are also quite nice.
But there are some bugs. There are some real issues here. Some of the essential charm and functionality of DD has been taken away. I hope it can be restored.
Noted. Try filtering you TOP 10 list to view the strips…
not trying to be a pompous arse, but did you guys run any usabilty test with a sample group before going forward with this?The admins here got to use it… We pointed out all the same issues and suggestions already :)
The site is probably very slow because it's currently being worked on.
As for the sqishy forums, I agree… One of the things that happened in the design stage was that the sidebar disappeared so the forums too up the entire space. -you HAD to go to the front page for PQs or faves, you had no choice.
That was annoying at first but I quickly got used to it and learned to love it!
It was like the old days when the front page was the main hub of the site again. :)
Hmm….
I'd have to say it looks more like a picture gallery now. Still, i understand that graphics attract more than text.
And although i realize no thought is put into this, but the site now looks really odd with the adblock on. HUGE white empty areas. (Although the user box ends up on top that way, so thats good.)
I am not one of those that's in crazy-hate over the new design, but the thing that REALLY BURNS ME UP is the loss of some of the essential functionality of the site.
Specifically, the chore that it now is to access my favorites is just not something I'm excited about. The accessiblity and ease of function of the favorites list was my number one favorite thing about DD…and it's been ruined.
Shift that puppy up the page, don't make me click on it to drop it down and give me back my same-screen editing function. Please. I'm begging you. I can't imagine visiting the site on a regular basis the way it is now.
And…put me down as another person upset that the top comics are no longer divided into two. As a person who is FAR more interested in strips on the web, mainly seeing full pages in the top ten is discouraging and not very useful.
And where's the news? That should be on the front page, no question about it. Now, it might as well not be there.
Basically, accessibility has been lost.
I know the site designers are gonna get a world of crap thrown at them this week for this, but overall I think the site is headed in the right direction. The ability to see a list of all past featured comics is great. So is the idea of multiple, editable lists on the front page. The popout comic descriptions are also quite nice.
But there are some bugs. There are some real issues here. Some of the essential charm and functionality of DD has been taken away. I hope it can be restored.
Noted. Try filtering you TOP 10 list to view the strips…
Will do, but I hate to have to choose. While I prefer strips, I don't want to freeze out pages completely.
Thanks for responding in any case. I think once you guys work out some of the kinks, we'll all fall in love all over again.
Ugh… Seeing everything in action. No. It just is NOT user friendly. It takes so much extra effort to do everything! Have to wait for the image-laden pages to load. Can't just read about the features. Nope. Have to hold the pointer over the thumbnail to see that. (And have to let my eyes pick a thumbnail from the wall o' thumbnails, which don't let any comics stand out… Titles were WAY better.) Can't see front page news. I have to search for it and jump through the hoops of multiple steps to see it. (That sort of ruins the point of having news, imo…) To get to my favorites or my controls, I have to scroll down past two big animated ads to my panel (at the bottom of the page?!) and then click a tab to open the thing and THEN click on the link I want. It used to be one step. :-/ I used to have easy access to everything, but now it's all a chore.
Also, the tabs I click don't stay open when I change pages… I don't like that at all. If I could open up my favorites list and leave it open and not condensed, that would be great.
Summary:
~Fewer steps to do what I need please.
~Just making it so we can keep our control panel thing open (favorites list, our comics list, etc.) would really help.
~More balanced image/text ratio on front page would look better. (Maybe titles with thumbnails appearing on the mouse over instead of vice versa?)
~News on the front page or quicker access to it, so it stands out.
~I like the lineup of feature thumbnails. I think it would look better and load faster (and bring them more attention) if they were they only thumbnails to load on the page immediately.
~Less important thing: Color scheme and tiny text. I'm squinting here. :-/
Anyway, I think it's headed in a good direction. Thanks for giving us a chance to look at it and help with trouble-shooting.
Upon seeing the new layout, I was very very very glad I have my own webspace somewhere else.
I think you should at least have kept the general look of the old layout(the story/strip rows, along with the old favorites/ my comic bar.
Really, I lived with the last major site update(December 06) but that was just an add to graphical quality, and moving favorites bar to the other side, and some sweet new features, but this is just ugly and sad.
Maybe you should have a change layout button, and set this as one of the options, but the old one as the default? that shouldn't be that hard to do, in fact, I'd call it easy =/
So are we not supposed to be able to access our preferences or something? Also, the top bar doesn't render properly in opera at ALL. There's about a 7 pixel gap and the text doesn't line up. How many moderators are actually on this site? You didn't exactly get a large testing sample, especially considering the reactions.
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