I've been rejigging the homepage!

The Ongoing Worlds website has been recently altered to:

• Help make it clearer what the site is about

• Help people find a game easier

• More easily show the features of the site

Things changed on the homepage

You might have seen the mockup I created and added to Facebook last month (LINK http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=488641091664&set=a.488641061664.262353.165913856664) showing these changes. I wanted to get approval from users before implementing them.

• The freetype search has been removed, looking in the website analytics showed that this wasn’t used very much, so I’ve removed it for now. One possible reason it wasn’t used is that new users might not know what to search for, so would rather pick from a list, and members might navigate to their game from their ‘My Profile’ page, which lists all the games they’re a member of.
  The search will probably return at some point as I believe it’s common practise to include a search in the top right of your website, and removing this might frustrate some people. But for now I wanted to remove it to make the other options clearer.

• The ‘Want to join a game?’ option is now at the top, this is a dropdown box of game categories. If users are thinking about joining a game or want to see games on the site, they can see all games of a category by selecting them here.

• The ‘Want to start a new game?’ option is now at the top, this used to be at the bottom, but looking at a heat graph of user movement on the site, not all users were scrolling to the bottom to see this. The button here goes through to our new ‘Features’ page, explained below.

The new ‘Features’ page

After some discussion with Twitter user @PandemicSoul (LINK) I realised that nowhere on the site shows a list of features to new members. There are a lot of really cool features which you can only see when you login, but this was never shown anywhere other to existing members who use them. So this new page describes the features of the site.

This page still isn’t my idea, it’s quite text-heavy and I’d rather it have some images and diagrams, maybe even some videos, but it’s a start. It will get better over time.

What do you think of these changes? Do you think they improve the site? Do you think you could make some better suggestions? Leave comments below or let me know on Twitter @ongoingworlds (LINK)

The Ongoing Worlds website has been recently altered to:

• Help make it clearer what the site is about
• Help people find a game easier
• More easily show the features of the site

Things changed on the homepage

You might have seen the mockup I created and added to Facebook last month (LINK http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=488641091664&set=a.488641061664.262353.165913856664) showing these changes. I wanted to get approval from users before implementing them.

• The freetype search has been removed, looking in the website analytics showed that this wasn’t used very much, so I’ve removed it for now. One possible reason it wasn’t used is that new users might not know what to search for, so would rather pick from a list, and members might navigate to their game from their ‘My Profile’ page, which lists all the games they’re a member of.
  The search will probably return at some point as I believe it’s common practise to include a search in the top right of your website, and removing this might frustrate some people. But for now I wanted to remove it to make the other options clearer.
• The ‘Want to join a game?’ option is now at the top, this is a dropdown box of game categories. If users are thinking about joining a game or want to see games on the site, they can see all games of a category by selecting them here.
• The ‘Want to start a new game?’ option is now at the top, this used to be at the bottom, but looking at a heat graph of user movement on the site, not all users were scrolling to the bottom to see this. The button here goes through to our new ‘Features’ page, explained below.

The new ‘Features’ page

After some discussion with Twitter user @PandemicSoul (LINK) I realised that nowhere on the site shows a list of features to new members. There are a lot of really cool features which you can only see when you login, but this was never shown anywhere other to existing members who use them. So this new page describes the features of the site.

This page still isn’t my idea, it’s quite text-heavy and I’d rather it have some images and diagrams, maybe even some videos, but it’s a start. It will get better over time.

What do you think of these changes? Do you think they improve the site? Do you think you could make some better suggestions? Leave comments below or let me know on Twitter @ongoingworlds (LINK)