The Mana World Forums

Please provide study reference or explain why current website have more than 5 links and you like it. I try to make content more available in 4 sections with new menu AND keep backward compatibility... your arguments are non-existing.[/quote]

Please provide study reference or explain why duplicate a part of the current menu would help people to find what they want.

KEEP IT SIMPLE is probably the essential rule of ergonomy.

Milla wrote:Please provide study reference or explain why current website have more than 5 links and you like it. I try to make content more available in 4 sections with new menu AND keep backward compatibility... your arguments are non-existing.

Simple, new big menu enable deep content access, right side bar menu keep existing users happy... can't have everything but that is the next best thing. Once this discussion is over I will create a poll to let users decide...

gagolthegreat wrote:Glad to see the tone is down a notch

If my first posts hurted you, then sorry.
but actually, you clearly on the nerves since I am trying to give constructive advices and references.
No, I do not want to take care of this website at your place.
So I will just now let you say what you want on YOUR thread, I gave already enough my opinion on that matter.

OK, back to topic...

Anyone have anything to say about the usage of big menus to enable more content access easily? Following this discussion I intent to keep existing menu in place in addition to the new menu system to satisfy the larger existing user base.

-gagolthegreat

I think grouping the links a bit is a good idea. Young people nowadays get easily confused if they have too much informations at once. Also this Web 2.0 approach is quite stylish.

I would group as follows:

Main
- Introduction/About
- News

Play (like Dropbox does it, Online registration and then offer the download - guided)
- Registration
- Download (of course still reachable without a new registration)

Help
- Summary/Links to Tutorials on the Wiki, Forums, new Articles

Community
- Forums
- Servers

Contribute
- Wiki
- Bugtracker
- Links


edit: Glorious MS paint skills.

gagolthegreat wrote:I already downloaded the website GIT and integrated it to a local test server with success (news feed excepted, but that is to be expected... if someone have access to current one, please forward so I can integrate to my test server...).

See include/fetch-news.sh

Generally I like your proposal of how to arrange the website and things like the random background image.

While I think your suggestion how to group the menu entries is really good, I'm a bit sceptical about hover menus. From my personal experience they tend to block exactly the content I was just wanting to watch or access, because I accidently got over the menu with my mouse cursor. To make it go away, I have to move the mouse to the border of the screen, because the popped up hover menu takes a rather large area and then wait a moment. By that point, I'm already annoyed.
I assume the usability depends on how you place the menu buttons and tune its sensibility, but those experiences is why I'm hover menus doesn't seem a good idea to me.

Thanks to Milla to challenge me so much, it is instructing and will keep me on my toes quality wise!

Thanks to Matt for his superb mockup! Ideas about login and players information should be discussed in another thread (trying to keep everything tidy) I will create shortly...

I am trying to keep the new menu organised by what the visitor wants (players/developers/etc) to do and I am very open to all your suggestions... Maybe shorter names could be used as suggested by Matt. To ensure uniformity I suggest we use verbs such as

I want to Play (register/download)
I want to Learn (various wiki links related to players such as quick walkthrough, quests, magic, etc)
I want to Contribute (developer tools and wiki links related to developers such as How to install development environment, etc...)
I want to About??? not a verb, need more thinking... (everything else about the project, the team, its history, etc...)

Thanks to o11c for pointing me the obvious. I downloaded the XML newsfeed and now my local test server have a completely functional copy.

The hovering really do not seems popular... Jenalya raised very valid points. I propose the click is required to open the menus, if JavaScript is disabled (noscript etc...) it goes to a page with the relevant informations.

-gagolthegreat

gagolthegreat wrote:I want to Learn (various wiki links related to players such as quick walkthrough, quests, magic, etc)
[...]
I want to About??? not a verb, need more thinking...

I want to know ?

(everything else about the project, the team, its history, etc...)

relates to wiki too

matt's awesome stats would be an useful tool to watch after the improvements
http://themanaworld.de/stats/

Nard

I am sorry, but my stats are dead for years. I actually wonder where the current ones come from

Matt wrote:I am sorry, but my stats are dead for years. I actually wonder where the current ones come from

Sure, what I meant was the installation on server of webalizer.
http://www.webalizer.org/
and publication of results of course.

what happened to all the good plans and the discussion?
Did he die or get bored?
I was really looking forward to this new design