Hi,
is it just me or is the new frontpage totally overloaded? I understand the desire to have everything "important" available there, but that leads to cluttering and isn't newbie-friendly at all.
For extreme cases of minimalistic design, see
http://www.openoffice.org/ or
http://www.winehq.org/ - the only purpose of their front pages is to lead the visitor in the right direction. That approach may increase the amount of clicks required to get somewhere, but it will make finding those clicks a lot easier.
For tasvideos, we probably should find a middle-ground between something easy and newbie-friendly and something powerful enough for the regulars. So here's some ideas and suggestions for the front page.
mockup image. Explanations follow:
The "Newbie-Box":
- If you're new, you need good visual guidance. While the colour could be improved, a seperate "newbie-box" with good visibility will help
- regulars should be able to hide said box, setting a permanent cookie or something. Or just hide the box for logged-in users. Or both.
- Get rid of all the text, tl;dr and stuff. Explanations how to view the videos are hardly front-page material, that can be explained on the movie pages. There should be a *short* introduction followed by a few useful links. Which links exactly we want to add can be argued about; I just added three non-perfect examples. We might also want to link our game resources and/or the contribute page.
- there's currently a tiny, barely visible youtube-video embedded on the right, displaying half a headline and a random frame. Replace it with a proper (and inviting) screenshot and do some javascript-magic to open the video inside a larger <div> like longplays.net used to do before the current drama.
News:
- I think it's enough to display the headlines with links. While it's good to have news on the front-page, they really shouldn't take up the majority of the space.
- The newsticker needs some visual identification, it's way ugly in my mockup.
Movies:
- Movies are the bread and butter of this site. They should have a prominent role on the front page. Suggesting revert to previous size.
- recommended movies: remove the obsoletion info ("Old was: 12:34:56"), it's only useful for recent publications. That will avoid some line-breaks when a larger screenshot is displayed.
- my mockup tried to interleave the new and recommended movies for better space usage with larger screenshots. I'm not sure that's a good idea, but I'll just keep it there for consideration.
discuss.
