main page changes

[SL33PY]

that's a carousel, default with bootstrap and jquery is super easy even my wife's webshop has that

http://www.piekewieke.be

[M.Steiner]

Yep, like that. Wasn't sure what they were called
One of those using the last 3 or so screenshots we have uploaded to our gallery would make a nice addition to the front page I think. At least the picture of it I have in my head!. I'll see if I can do a mock-up in PS to see what it would look like at 1080.

[M.Steiner]

Mock-up:

FrontPageMockup.jpg (488.11 KiB) Viewed 8679 times

Btw, not important but I noticed that in the "preview" post when clicking the image it screws the layout on the right like before. Just not when you've actually posted. If that makes sense?

[SL33PY]

lets propose another change

how about you make "Archived groups" a link to another page or view (in the central div on the homepage) from which people can navigate further away.

I noticed that people find it confusing and they don't see "archived groups" and tell me, "That game doesn't even exist anymore, how old is this shit?"

I'm like "Helloo! 'archived group'?"

you get what i mean



Thanks in advance for the awesome work anubis



Edit:

As alternative to m.s. share buttons you can have a "Share me" label and then the small icons that target a share ... I'm afraid that otherwise it will be too heavy

[M.Steiner]

how about you make "Archived groups" a link to another page or view (in the central div on the homepage) from which people can navigate further away.

How about a drop-down menu if that's possible?
The button would look like the "Archived News" button on the opposite side except by pressing the Archived Groups button you'd drop a menu down where these links would appear instead. This keeps the links on the main page but neatly hidden away until you drop said menu down, rather than navigating someone away to another page or whatever.

I've done a sprite image to match the news one:


I certainly wouldn't remove them completely, as I think it's great that we've made a point of preserving and showing off our history, if only for the SSX days atm (SSC too when we finish that bloody timeline ). As of right now though the archived group links are dominating the groups above them because there are so many of them. Adding them into a drop-down menu (in the same place on the site) would be a good idea though I think

As alternative to m.s. share buttons you can have a "Share me" label and then the small icons that target a share ... I'm afraid that otherwise it will be too heavy

I could do a "share me" button as well if needed but will hold off for now. Anny hasn't posted in here since last Thu so I'll wait and see what he thinks about the rest of this stuff first, and if/how he thinks they can be implemented before I do any more images. That way I'm not wasting any time or having to go back and redo stuff

[Anubis]

I don't think the idea of larger banner images works myself unless it's either attached to news or links. The mock up looks nice and all, but it also looks like an image there for an image's sake rather than for a reason - not a good thing. It would also require us to provide new "thumbnail" size images for each of the hundreds of images in the gallery, which is not a simple ask. I'm also fond of the SSOTD as a separate note, as it lets us showcase our very large gallery in an accessible way

With regards to the Like buttons etc, I haven't forgotten but need to have a think (and probably prompt a discussion) about how people are expecting them to work before I can go ahead and do anything. I'm not completely clear on it, and don't want to start dev without knowing what I'm aiming to produce

Finally, I'm open to making changes to the Archived Groups list if people want. Like MS said I would not want them removed, as I think it's really important to make available and preserve our history - there's a lot of awesome content in there. A drop-down-list is doable certainly, but I'm not altogether certain that button style works as a way to present it - particularly given we already have a link of that style on the page which behaves differently. To be honest I'm not overly sure that a drop down navigation style element works well at all in the overall design, given we don't use it anywhere else across the entire website, but I'm open to being convinced otherwise. Probably needs thinking about from an MS (i.e. creative) perspective

EDIT: To be honest, I think that drop down style top navigation would be a good thing for us, as we have an awful lot of content we try to include at the moment (and some we can't due to link overload). But implementing it in a broad and inclusive way would almost certainly require a full redesign of the site. So...yeah...

[SL33PY]

you could make the menu over there a bootstrap accordion, with only the current groups open, so people can still navigate to the archived groups if they like

Also for the random pic of the day, it might be interesting to produce something (a php file ) that randomly selects one picture each day and posts it on twitter at 6pm 'ish "#SSX random pic of the day: http://tinyu.rl/1HJD4 #nameofgameofrandomshot"

[Anubis]

Yeah, I know how I could do the dropdown. It's really easy infact. The presentation just needs thinking about first as I say. One single drop down element on a completely static site isn't natural, and we need to present it in a way so that it's obvious what it is and that it differs from the other content.

As for the picture of the day, if Twitter allows that kind of thing then yes I could, fairly easily, since I'd just be extending slightly the SSOTD code we already have

EDIT: To be continued here, plox? Website Change Requests