new crawl homepage

[Moose]

Maybe this is a case of "who moved my cheese", but I'm not digging the new http://crawl.develz.org.

When I go to that page, it's typically for one of two reasons: either to see the latest "news" (I really like pleasing fungus's update summaries), or to hit one of the links to the scoring overview, tavern, or knowledge bot searches.

The NEW page takes up all immediate screen real-estate with pictures of people's games, which is not really what I came there to see. If I scroll way down, I see some awkward links to the news I came to find, but it doeesn't include the concise layout you find here: http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/ ...

Am I just an old curmudgeon who hates change? Is this new site an improvement?

It seems like a lot of content and information has been lost.

[neil]

The wordpress site isn't going away, so you can just bookmark that one. The new front page is intended to be a catchy attention-grabber to draw in new players.

[Eyesburn]

The NEW page takes up all immediate screen real-estate with pictures of people's games, which is not really what I came there to see.

Reason to open it: just to see that sixotanaka the sneak picture when Im feeling down.

[chequers]

As the person behind 99% of the new design, sorry #notsorry . Basically what neil said -- the focus is much more on new players than existing ones, who are expected to know where to go anyway. My big inspirations were game sites like Hearthstone, Cities: Skylines and so on, where the emphasis is "this is a game, click here to watch a video and click here to play now".

[Siegurt]

I would like it if there was link to the wordpress page somewhere.

"For updates and news go here"

[chequers]

There is a "All news..." link in the news section. Too hard to spot?

[Tedronai]

I like the new website. However I think the following should be changed:

Currently the screenshots for the "Live games" are randomly assigned. I understand that it is not technically feasible to fetch screenshots from the actual games. However I think it should at least display pictures from the same location from where the players current milestone is reported. For example right now I get "Paperscraps the Thaumaturge (In a Volcano)" and it displays a picture with an Antaeus fight. This could be really frustrating for people who quickly want to tune in, anticipating they are going to witness something spectacular... In my opinion it shouldn't be too hard to implement that, you just need a big enough pool of screenshots which are tagged with their location.

Sorry for hijacking the thread.

[chequers]

I agree, but nobody stepped up to supply screenshots when I asked last month and I'm only so motivated. (Hint hint)

[mechanicalmaniac]

The new HP is quite eye-catching, but I the plain white background is rather bland. Maybe we could get Baconkid to do more of his art?

[Siegurt]

There is a "All news..." link in the news section. Too hard to spot?

"All news" takes you to http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/blog which is a date-sorted list of all the blog entries (It in fact doesn't take you to "all news" it takes you to "all blog entries")

There's no link to:
http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress
Which contains an overview of the game, a link to both the "news" and "blog" sections:
http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/category/news
and
http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/blog
respectively

At very least "all news" should point to
http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/category/news
Which is what "more news" points to in the wordpress page, and have a separate link for "Read our development blog" or some such which points to http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/blog

However no links at all to the wordpress front page negates the content posted therein for new users.

I would advocate something like:

"For the latest news, and more details see the {link}'wordpress'{/link} page.

---
Note also the front-page linked version of the download page no access to the development builds at all;
Compare:
http://crawl.develz.org/download.htm
to
http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/downloads

I assume this was intentional, however with no links to the wordpress page, there's no way to transition a new player to one who can readily access the wordpress versions of the download page

This makes navigating to for example:
http://crawl.develz.org/trunk/
All but impossible for someone who has never been to the site before now, and for someone who wants to learn about development builds and build their own source, there's no reasonable way to get to a page with the introduction for doing so. (Again, shy of clicking on news or blog posts and using the sidebar icon, which is awkward and doesn't make any sense from a user input sense, why would you go to the download page from the news posts, and why would you think it would go to a different download page than the link on the main page would take you to)

[chequers]

I guess that's a few points:
1. No link to http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress. This is intentional, http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/ is the old homepage that has been replaced, and it will soon(er or later) vanish
2. The current division between "news" and "dev blog" should be kept. I disagree, modern game sites like League of Legends and Guild Wars 2 have a single news stream for all categories. I think this is a conscious design choice and one I agree with.
3. No offline trunk build links. This should be added, missing them is an oversight.

One thing that I didn't make clear in my previous post was: the release of this new landing site isn't just a standalone project. It's the first step in a major overhaul of the DCSS's web architecture. Obsoleted pages on Wordpress (index, downloads) will be going away as they become completely redundant. DCSS's current website has good information hidden in a disorganised warren of pages surrounded by unimportant and out-of-date cruft. This is a situation I want to significantly improve!

[Siegurt]

I guess that's a few points:
1. No link to http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress. This is intentional, http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/ is the old homepage that has been replaced, and it will soon(er or later) vanish
2. The current division between "news" and "dev blog" should be kept. I disagree, modern game sites like League of Legends and Guild Wars 2 have a single news stream for all categories. I think this is a conscious design choice and one I agree with.
3. No offline trunk build links. This should be added, missing them is an oversight.

One thing that I didn't make clear in my previous post was: the release of this new landing site isn't just a standalone project. It's the first step in a major overhaul of the DCSS's web architecture. Obsoleted pages on Wordpress (index, downloads) will be going away as they become completely redundant. DCSS's current website has good information hidden in a disorganised warren of pages surrounded by unimportant and out-of-date cruft. This is a situation I want to significantly improve!

Hm, that seems counter to

The wordpress site isn't going away, so you can just bookmark that one. The new front page is intended to be a catchy attention-grabber to draw in new players.

This statement.

Perhaps not everyone is on the same page with what the intention is here?

Personally I like having separate news/dev blog feeds, collapsing them as one feed means if I want to read important announcements, I have to scroll through unimportant discussions of "hey we're doing X, Y, and Z" which may or may not be relevant to my interests. Redesigning them into one feed may be appropriate or not, but I for one wouldn't like it. Note that for instance, betas and "in progress" changes don't appear in the news feed, but do in the blog feed.

If this new interface is intended to completely replace the existing wordpress site, then it needs to have all the same functionality (whether implemented differently or not)

Some things I consider important for new players that are currently not linked from the front page interface, other than by going to 'all news' and clicking on sidebar links:

This forum
The bug tracker
##crawl
(trunk builds as discussed)
Reddit communities
learnDB
The online documentation
the FAQs (Which might or might not be up to date, I haven't looked at them all)

Some things that non-newbies might want access to:
The various git locations
The online scoring page

Things which aren't specifically useful for a player, but which they still might be interested in:
Links to other roguelikes
Histories, stories about the old versions of the game and how DCSS came to be
Art, community contributions

I'm sure the intention here is to get some or all of that into whatever the new site's format is intended to be. In the interim, however, it might be nice if there was a way for the uninitiated to get access to the existing information until it's all migrated.

[Siegurt]

Also, personally, I dislike how the "Play online" is emphasized as like "the way to do it" and there's a small link below it to download offline games, given that we know that a large percentage of people prefer to play offline (myself included) it seems weird to de-emphasize it so heavily (Personally, I'd have put two buttons side by side, "Play online" might still be first choice)

If the intention is specifically to steer new players towards online play and away from offline play, then the design makes sense (Although I'd be curious as to why that's so...)

[ebering]

From the new front page (emphasis mine).

Help & Community
Community Wiki: Up-to-date information on game items & concepts
Forum: Debate strategy and propose changes on our forums
IRC: ##crawl on Freenode is filled with helpful souls offering real-time advice
Bug Reports: Found a problem? Let us know!

[Siegurt]

From the new front page (emphasis mine).

Help & Community
Community Wiki: Up-to-date information on game items & concepts
Forum: Debate strategy and propose changes on our forums
IRC: ##crawl on Freenode is filled with helpful souls offering real-time advice
Bug Reports: Found a problem? Let us know!

Duh, now I feel silly for not scrolling all the way down to the bottom