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Gamasutra Redesigns, Adds Blogs, Enhanced Functionality
by Staff [PC, Console/PC]
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March 5, 2009
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Leading game industry site Gamasutra has redesigned, and we're now offering free game industry weblogs for all members - with expert bloggers already writing - an enhanced contractors section, discipline-specific sections, and much more.
We're still in the midst of fixing things, optimizing, and otherwise improving the experience, post-launch, so please feel free to comment on this post (or mail help at gamasutra dot com) with any issues you're currently experiencing, or website-related suggestions.
Some of the major changes to Gamasutra, apart from the obvious visual improvements, are the following:
- Our new blogs section is divided into Expert Blogger and Member Blogger areas. We've already got some great experts contributing, from Brenda Brathwaite through Mark DeLoura and beyond, contributing in the Expert Blogs section.
- In addition, as editor Chris Remo explains in his blog post, any Gamasutra user can go ahead and set up their own blog and start writing about game development and the industry.
- Related to this, you can also now attach an avatar to your account, which will appear on your blog profile page and next to your comments.
- We've significantly enhanced the Contractors section of the website, with lots more categories for those wanting to target their products and services to video game professionals worldwide. (Pardon the dust in this area, we're still in the process of refining it.)
- We now have targeted Programming, Art, Design, Audio, and Production pages, listed on the left navigation, with features, news, blog posts and jobs for those disciplines handily collated together. We'll also be posting more discipline-specific features, going forward.
- Of course, we still have our regular sections of Gamasutra that you know and love fully operable, including our market-leading jobs section, plus the latest industry news and in-depth features.
Thanks to everyone who gave feedback and helped make this momentous site change (the first redesign for Gamasutra of the 21st century!) come together. Please post feedback below and we'll try to respond as soon as we can.
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The only other comment I have are the links to the W2 sites (digg, Stumble Upon, etc): they should be at the bottom, because you want users to read the news or features first and then suggest them in those sites, and not just come here to click those links.
That is all for now :-) Congrats!
Now if you excuse me, I'll be putting on my Katsumi Orochi avatar.
I do miss the soft yellow, and the particular green used at the top followed by the black background and white foreground's extreme contrast induces minor headaches, while the light green used for links are faint enough to cause me to squint (as opposed to the easier-to-see brick red before) -- but I may be a minority. Could there be a way to choose between the current color scheme and the old color scheme but still have the new structure?
Also, Jennifer, we will see what we can do about making it a little less contrast-y. We like the black and green background, but certainly, making the background lighter would do that.
For the links and title bars throughout the page being displayed in green, I find the top background image to be a little too much. It is almost as if there was a step backwards in the visual design of the site. Everything is very hard edge, no play in style to give a softer feel which is what the color palette needs.
Great work on the restructure and refocus on content!
... and the swirly green stuff like on the Space channel website. :)
http://www.spacecast.com/Default.aspx
Also, I would like to see a cellphone-friendly version of the site.
I see you put anonymous back though. Just testing to see if that works.
Looking over the site, it seems pretty slick and the new features sound exciting! I will miss the yellow, though...
Great stuff!
May I ask where to mobile link is to mobile-gamasutra?
I liked the background image :-( If you are going to implement color schemes, maybe you should also add selectable timezones. While US knows what PST is, the rest of the world usually works with UTC/GMT offsets.
In the comments area it would be nice to have a "Contact the editor" to leave typos and corrections instead of using the general comment area. I haven't seen many instances where I wanted to contact a moderator to remove comments fortunately, but a button for that may be useful and even deter some trolling before it happens. Not really needing an edit button for comments, but if you add it it should be able to add a timestamp indicating the message has been modified since it was last posted.
For the wishlist, being able to track your own comments, especially to know if there is a follow up. The other day I saw someone had replied to one of my comments almost a month before and was already too late to reply to him.
The individual member blog RSS (for example, http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/rss/156/BrendaBrathwaite/) is missing the value of the pubDate field, that is pretty awful because there are some RSS readers don't fill that with the date of discovery, therefore they cannot sort the items (as it would be impossible to go back to the original sorting). I am guessing it is a bug because all other feeds include it.
The terms of service and privacy policy need a page title. As for the TOS, I find one sentence to be odd: "You retain all rights to material posted on your homepage and in your weblog, and may post copyright or other notices to that effect." If I assume I am losing copyright to the comments done to articles, it would explain why I need Think Services authorization in order to reproduce comments done here as stated in "You also agree that you will not: reproduce, distribute, republish or retransmit material posted by any other Gamasutra users without the permission of that user and Think Services;" However it seems odd that there is no explicit mention about the copyright status of comments.
Finally, about the news themselves, whenever linking to a news item within a news, it would be nice to have the ALT text of the hyperlink be set to the title of the article being linked so that hovering the mouse on top of it would let us know it. And that the related news section include the date of the news being being linked at.
Also, not that I am bothered, but some may be used at having the vlink set to a different color so that they know when they have already visited a link.
By the way, thanks for not using AJAX with odd effects like sliding down comments and such. It makes it easy to use the page through a cellphones.
First feedback: Don't blacklist gmail. Some of us rely on it.
Redesign overall appears nice. Progress!
- Joel, while we'd like to personalize what sidebars and feeds are open, you're right, that's not in this version. Maybe Gama 3.0!
- Anonymous #1, you can always bookmark the much wider news index page - http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php - if you're not loving the front page. Also, bad news, the 'anonymous' tickbox was accidentally re-included, and will be going away again soon.
- Christian - edit button for the comments does need to happen, but is probably a medium-term fix.
- Juha and Niklas, the mobile version of Gamasutra is currently turned off because it dated from the Palm Pilot days (!) and was actually a little bit broken anyhow, but we'll look at getting that back, even a basic news and jobs version, in the next couple of days.
- Roberto, that textbox width and height problem is silly on our part, we will fix today. I like your comment reporting and tracking comments but they are probably longer-term. The pubDate snafu on RSS will be fixed ASAP, probably today. We added comments to the ToS as you suggested. Your two other comments will go on the list (ALT text, related). We (Nick) fixed the caching problem.
- Anonymous #2, this Gmail email issue just came up yesterday, for now forward your comments to simon at archive dot org with the rejected notice from your gmail account.
Thanks all!
Can we get a 'business' category or something along those lines for articles that deal with business related news and blogs. I don't know which of the current categories stories about Shifts in management and retail would fall under.
i like knowing i can sign in right up front
Homepage is a little cramped though. The wall of text approach certainly works, but you do have a do a little more scanning than before.
In any event, did the RSS feed get nixed in the upgrade? It's how I get the links through the day. It's probably on somebody's list of things to do, but it may just be me.
Ah, the new avatar pictures are cool. It's nice to see the images are of people generally, and not 37 different pictures of Cloud Strife.
Also, I think it's funny that you are delighted people that are using their own pictures as avatars, but yours is of a cute cartoon bear :P
Like a lot of other comments I am unsure if I like or dislike the black background- perhaps a slight off color of black or gradient would be better. Regardless, the new look and features are very nice. I am digging the blogs and layout. Good job!
however, i think its a real step in the right direction. Incorporating expert blogs could really add another dimension to an already useful site.
I too am having "staying logged in" issues, will try the cookie delete dealie.
My major complaint though is the colors, the contrast between the black background + whitish page background is far to glaring ( I see others feel the same )
@Simon: I still find it very unfortunate in your choice to remove Anonymous tags, as not long after you did that, we started getting some of the most ridiculous pseudonyms posting, and after a while it seems that editors as a whole no longer did anything about it.
Other than that, I am impressed with a lot of the changes; the larger text box to type in is certainly a boon. The "Submit Comment" button's colours do seem a bit out of place though...
- We're working on a lighter background as we speak, and it should be rolled out this afternoon, hopefully.
- The avatar issue (if you get a new avatar, your old posts don't have it) is known, and we're looking at a workaround or other fix.
- Sean, on anonymous posting, we will try to be a bit stricter about stupid fake names - it's a fair point.
I'll be replacing my avatar pic with the required Cloud Strife (or I guess Tifa) shortly.
And the site moves sloooowly now. Loading a new page takes a couple of extra seconds because of all the flash ads and gewgaws.
I apologize, but I am not a fan of the redesign.
You have a high number of people posting without an avatar, and as such, your "black box with white question mark" avatar icon comes up a lot. The problem is that both its colors (high contrast, bold) and content (the "?" begs answering as if there's a mystery to solve) draw a huge amount of attention to itself, when both the poster's content and name is more interesting, and they're both dwarfed by the icon. It would be better to tone down the colors (white background, light gray text) and neutralize the content (perhaps a simple gray Atari-looking joystick instead of a screaming giant question-mark) so that it doesn't stick out so much. Also, if the GamaSutra cookie can remember my name, it should be able to remember my "Your Website (optional)" when posting comments too.
Could you please link the department headers on the main page and inside the departments themselves to the "View All" or equivalent function? For example, the image Features_header.gif would be a much more prominent and an easier-to-hit target for my mouse than the small "View All" text underneath it.
When I have finished reading a feature or a news item, I would always like to return to the list of other items in that department. It would be very easy to do that if I could just click the header over the item title.
The same goes for the "Latest ..." header images on the left hand side of your layout.
I strongly feel these changes would improve the usability of Gamasutra at least 57.23%.
Nice new update,
Mike
- Joshua and Glenn, GREAT idea on the less contrasty-y no avatar image, we're going to do something today and change it out.
- Mike, can you tell us what browser you are getting that ads problem on? Mail to scarless at cmp dot com should do it.
- Jarmo, nice constructive comments. Header links are easy to do and we'll add to the list.
The narrow column is still a problem for me, though -- and it's not front-page specific. The main issue comes from reading the comments on a post with a lot of comments like this one or the Opinion piece recently with 85+ comments. I'd suggest that in the thread, you widen it a bit as well, since right now it ends up excessively 'blocky' and harder for the eye to follow (especially in the case of a long comment!)
I am using Chrome, I realize it isn't the most popular browser but it seems to be fixed now.
Thanks,
Mike
Anyway compliments for the restyling.
Daniele.
1. Features of only one page show "Page of " at the bottom (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3215/myths_and_facts_in_avoiding_.php)
2. It is hard to jump to determined pages in the News/Features lists. Your best chance is to edit the URL yourself, but if you add a number out of bounds, like http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?page=1100, you end up with a blank page instead of the index or the last page.
3. There is something odd with old articles (although I think this has already been happening): The "Next News Story" link points to an article of 2003 or later. For example, choosing links from http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?page=1066 (news from '99, I picked five randomly, including the last two ones), then clicking the "Next News Story" link from within the article all lead to 2003 articles.
Now that you have Blogs, you should consider adding some filters for the search box, to include/exclude features, news, blogs and other sections, and ascending and descending order. Also, it seems you have removed the time when posting news, leaving only the date. However, search results still return times, as 00:00:00 for news and features (although times are returned for blogs). Maybe search results should return the amount of comments if any as well.
Other than that, smooth transition so far.
- Daniele, email me if you see this (scarless @ think-services dot com) with example of your alignment issue, we cannot reproduce.
- Roberto, we'll look at those mini-bugs, they are all good ones.
- Mark, we fixed the footer bug.
- Glenn, we do indeed still have problems with the site not universally updating avatars when someone changes them. We will look into that!
For some strange reason, I have to log-in every time I want to make a comment. In the past, I used to only need to log-in once, and I stayed logged-in indefinitely. I wonder what the cause is that forces me to enter my email and password every time I make a comment? I also have problems with the log-in link button at the bottom of the screen... logging-in only seems to work for me when I use the log-in function on the left side of the screen.
"more news", it's just missing from the front page news item list. Thanks. It's looking better and better every time I check in. Good luck.
…and maybe go in and give my title-less blog item a temporary title, so I can access it, please?
Could you please add links also to the headers placed on top of the articles? For example, when a feature article is opened, it has the image Features_page_header.gif at the top. If this image had the http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/article_display.php link, it would be very easy to get back to all features (to choose another article to read) after finishing with the currently open one.
You already have the same link at the top menu bar, but the image would be a much more prominent mouse target. Having the link also there would make using the site that extra little bit more convenient.
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If you wanted to go all out in improving this bit of the UI, I'd suggest passing the current feature / news / etc. list page number as a parameter to the opened article, where it would be used to modify the link defined above to ultimately return the reader to the list page they opened the article from.
An example use case:
1) The user starts at the Features web page listing all of the features.
2) The user opens page 3 of the Features list from the link at the bottom of the page.
3) The user opens a feature article from the list and reads it, navigating to next pages as needed.
4) The user clicks the large Features image at the top of the last page of the article.
5) The link returns the user to page 3 of the Features list.
This would make it really convenient to read through a large batch of the articles at one time. One would need only to open articles, read them and click the link to get back to the list, opening new list pages as needed. One would never be just returned to the first list page and have to navigate back to the list page one opened an article from to continue reading older articles.