Please, for the love of all that is good and gravy - change the welcome page!

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Jan 19 2016, 2:58 am
In response to Ganite
Ganite wrote:
1 dedicated person would be better.. this is BYOND trying to rely on everyone prob won't go to well. And its crazy how people were saying "To much to time for lummox blah blah blah" then ATHK offers now everyone saying "Shouldn't be for a single person". You guys don't know what you want lol.

I don't think it's that crazy - I suspect rather that people don't have a particularly firm plan in mind, or anything beyond a sentiment that they agree, but either want the existing BYOND team to handle it in-house or want multiple members of the community involved so the result is something true to the flavour of the site they've been part of.

From a purely logical standpoint it makes sense to have more than one person able to work on it - otherwise that person's life is going to be taken over by "By the way, can you just..." for the next several weeks-months.

I do think we should get some design work done, too - even if it's just a few mockups of possibilities. Design by committee is fairly horrible, but a better solution might be to poll the people here who have on opinion on elements, themes and colours that they'd like to see incorporated (then include them in different configurations).
Jan 19 2016, 9:43 am
In response to Deathguard
Deathguard wrote:
I do think we should get some design work done, too - even if it's just a few mockups of possibilities. Design by committee is fairly horrible, but a better solution might be to poll the people here who have on opinion on elements, themes and colours that they'd like to see incorporated (then include them in different configurations).

While I'm open to making changes to the landing page, the site as a whole is something I don't intend to do much to for a good long time. Mucking with its styles is extremely costly in terms of time, and things that look easy on paper, like "move this bit over here", are often the nastiest things to implement.

The only design changes I want to even consider are ones that are minimally invasive. The welcome page is good fodder for this, but I wouldn't say the same of, say, the headbar or the forum pages.
Jan 19 2016, 12:54 pm
In response to Lummox JR
Added responsiveness man. That's all I'm asking for. The whole site overhaul that many users crave for is too much work. All I want is to stop having to scroll everywhere while on mobile. I'm on my phone 100% of the time I'm surfing the web. You fixed that YouTube issue we had going on, which is great.
Jan 19 2016, 2:07 pm
In response to GreatPirateEra
The only YouTube issue I'm aware of is where it's currently using the Flash embed code rather than the iframe code, which it's still doing.

I'm also not quite sure what you mean about the scrolling.
Jan 19 2016, 2:48 pm
What they mean by the scrolling is, when they (just like me) view the site on a mobile browser, we have to pinch/zoom/scroll all over the place to navigate the site.

I don't think I'm wrong, but even with the website update some time ago, I can only figure the codebase is ancient, and probably uses no modern practices that would make a visual revamp an easy process (like MVC).

Also have to figure in you don't have the know-how to really get it going.

I'm just here for the meme threads now really.
Jan 19 2016, 2:56 pm
In response to EnigmaticGallivanter
The site is a fixed size and doesn't use media queries, if that's what you mean. (And good gads, going back to changeable sizes would be a nightmare.)

With the HTML/CSS the main factor is that it got built somewhat organically over a number of years, factoring in many changes to the site over time, and now there's a lot of cruft. There are various pages that should have a kind of standardization, but don't fully because they use different templates. I've tried to bring more and more of those templates in line with each other and also nix ones we no longer use, but making a big style change requires looking over all of those pages again--and, inevitably, missing a lot of things.

(In MVC terms, basically there are a great many views, and they're hard to sync up.)

It's really a shame that the proliferation of modern feature support in browsers didn't happen a lot sooner; it could have spared me a lot of headaches. IE6 hanging on as long as it did, like a frelling cancer, was the bane of all web designers everywhere.
Jan 19 2016, 5:09 pm
In response to EnigmaticGallivanter
EnigmaticGallivanter wrote:
I'm just here for the meme threads now really.

i'll get right on that
Jan 19 2016, 5:11 pm
If you're willing to pass on the site files I'm fine with modifying the structure and adding in responsive'ness and making everything consistent.

If not I'll just work on the boundaries you gave me inside the #main_content div and the landing page.

Up to you, I'm easy either way.
Jan 19 2016, 6:48 pm
Well folks.

BYOND isn't a democracy, it's a dictatorship.. and Lummox is the dictator. Now bow down to your supreme overlord! So if you guys want to enact your vision of a modern welcome page/pitch - just do it. Do it and send it to Lummox, post it here - do something.

The entire website could need redone, but it doesn't matter if lummox doesn't want to.

Lummox said he is willing to accept *Simple* designs for the web page if anyone wants to take a shot at it.

Another way to put it is in the form of a quote:

So if you care about this (and you may not) - just go straight to Lummox with a design- don't even bother debating it with people who will be doing absolutely nothing to help.

Cheers.
Jan 19 2016, 6:55 pm
In response to A.T.H.K
A.T.H.K wrote:
If you're willing to pass on the site files

it's pretty easy to download the entire BYOND website.

Try scrapbook, if you happen to use firefox : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/scrapbook/
Jan 19 2016, 8:25 pm
In response to A.T.H.K
I'd prefer to stick with keeping it simple for the time being, just working on the landing page and its associated pages for content changes within that div.
Jan 19 2016, 11:33 pm
In response to IchiroKeisuke
IchiroKeisuke wrote:
A.T.H.K wrote:
If you're willing to pass on the site files

it's pretty easy to download the entire BYOND website.

Try scrapbook, if you happen to use firefox : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/scrapbook/

That's not what I'd need nor want if I were to change the structure of lets say .. Everything, its easy to modify the frontend, its a whole different story at the back, as most of this is probably loaded dynamically compared to being static and cached..
Jan 20 2016, 2:47 am
In response to A.T.H.K
if I were to change the structure of lets say .. Everything

He only seems interested in a new landing page. So I doubt it would do you much good to try that at this point.

Still, plz make that landing page happen. A modern pitch for the engine on the website would help show visitors the engine has been updated and maintained. That's a great step in the right direction.
Jan 20 2016, 5:06 am
In response to Lummox JR
Lummox JR wrote:
While I'm open to making changes to the landing page, the site as a whole is something I don't intend to do much to for a good long time. Mucking with its styles is extremely costly in terms of time, and things that look easy on paper, like "move this bit over here", are often the nastiest things to implement.

The only design changes I want to even consider are ones that are minimally invasive. The welcome page is good fodder for this, but I wouldn't say the same of, say, the headbar or the forum pages.

I was only meaning the landing page: I'm going to ask the designer from the company I work at to mock up a few things [at my expense, before anyone panics] and then I'll just write one of them if nobody thinks they're actively worse than the current design.

"move this bit over here"

I sympathise: this is going on 90% of the frustration from 'minor' change requests I deal with for my job. I do think we need to make the homepage responsive and mobile-friendly though, even if it's just pure CSS changes and we never touch anything else.

The site is a fixed size and doesn't use media queries, if that's what you mean.

Yes. It's a nontrivial drawback and every browser with a market share has supported media queries for a long time now. Mobile browsing is really, really big - over 50% of the market share.

[For anyone interested that isn't a web techie person; "Mobile-friendly responsive design" is the concept that you open a site on any device and it rearranges and alters the styling to look good and give a better user experience. ]

The landing page is where your new users are first hitting - to my mind, having a non-responsive page is the equivalent of advertising in black and white. Without any specifics I'm aware that bounce rates are higher and conversion rates are lower on client's sites without responsive design.
Jan 20 2016, 9:38 am
I'm not unsympathetic to mobile browsers. I've found the site can sometimes be a little frustrating on an iPad, so I can only imagine on a phone that's worse. I wish I knew a better way to determine which version to use, though (assuming I had a mobile design), because resolution does not necessarily tell the whole story. The iPhone as you know has a very high DPI, so its resolution could read like a desktop monitor instead of a phone.
Jan 20 2016, 11:25 am
In response to IchiroKeisuke
Oh sure. These comments happen all the time as a site or service nears the end of its lifespan. Everyone has a solution on how to "fix" things but no one ever does because they're always waiting for the first person to jump. This is why BYOND's game base is poor, this is why BYOND's resource base is poor. But then when people do jump, their efforts are criticized and people say "well why don't you do something better" and it goes on and on.

The best choice for BYOND is to become a software provider site and to stop trying to be a bad Steam. Which, credit to Lummox, he has his priorities in the right place. The quicker BYOND users can turn BYOND games into games, the better it will be for BYOND.
Jan 21 2016, 4:20 am
In response to Lummox JR
There are techniques for handling this; current methodology is not to target devices (you can't, there are too many, and they'll invent more) or any specific screen sizes (same reason) but just to make sure there isn't a configuration it breaks at.

At my place we do mobile-first responsive development, so start off with some minimum (320px, usually) screen width, make it look good on that, expand the screen until something looks bad, or you decide there's room to change the layout, add a media query breakpoint, expand again, etc...

The iPhone as you know has a very high DPI, so its resolution could read like a desktop monitor

Besides potentially using Retina images for modern smartphones, we haven't needed any special tricks particularly: just min-width queries, the "viewport" meta tag, and lots of cross-browser testing.
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