And what does everyone HERE think about all this?

[Bolweevil]

We have a whole guild full of designers of all levels of skill, and with different views on about everything design related.

What do we all think of the new and improved GaiaOnline? I could spend all night in the forums listening to people complain or compliment it, but I'm more interested in what you guys may think.

This guild has always been good for constructive criticism, and now we have an oppertunity to turn our eye towards Gaia and say what we think of the changes. What we like, what we dislike, what we would have done differently.

What are all of your opinions on the new layout? Show no mercy. Look at it as you would any other site submitted here for approval.  

[rogue_designer]

The new layout - overall - I like. It has a less feminine feel... more prototypical oomph. I like that they tried to utilize elements of the previous design within the new framework. It is not a perfect union, but it does help prevent unncessary alienation of their veteran users.

However. The navigation seems ill conceived. I would guess most of the traffic on the site heads to the forums. But when you rollover the community label (to bring up really poorly implemented CSS and ocassionally flash driven destinations) the forums and guilds are the furthest away from your last mouse point.

Add to that the tendency for the menu to vanish or swap out if you deviate by more than 1/4" in what (on my monitor) is an 8 inch track across the monitor - you end up with a frustrating experience.

Most people I think, will end up bookmarking their choice destinations, rendering the homepage useless - and their advertising potential and announcement effectiveness will be limited.

So - in short... visually good idea. But the Navigation and technology drivers are pretty poorly thought out. C+ overall  

[124-C]

I personally like the new website styling, and I'll spare the technical stuff as that's already been taken care of. But I personally am still on a 56k connection and Gaia was slow to begin with. Now it seems almost impossible to navigate. Maybe I'm just percieving it as being slower, but the page loads seem to take forever.  

[thejessjess]

i have to agree with the site looking less feminine which is a good thing! i am also annoyed with the navigation. dont really understand the reason for the black space after the cat girl and i think the change is in the banner is ok if it didnt move...there really isnt a point to it so why use it? i am also usin a dial up modem...dont ask why...and it does seem that everything is takin forever to load! im not even gunna try to walk around the towns!  

[caustic 0_0]

The pages have been glitching alot more for me so far >.<
One thing I didn't realize until I saw a post about it in Site Feedback is that if you click on Community it takes you straight to the forums. Unfortunately you wouldn't know that until you accidentally clicked on it while trying to navigate elsewhere or read it someone's post, but if you know about it and want to get to forums quicker then it helps^^

Vo added on to the announcement. Thankfully it's a work in progress still xD
I do believe they have at least wisened up about the black thing behind the avatar and extending into the banner. It's a lighter blue now, and you can see your avatar alot better. (At least I can since my avatar has alot of black)

And where has the memberlist gone to?  

[Koiyuki]

Like everyone else said, I think the overall look is less feminine, and more simplified then before. *though I have both Gaia bars, so site navigation was never a problem for me in the first place. xD* But also, like others have said, the design may confuse most, and frustrate those on lesser connections. *is on DSL* thus causing people to bookmark their favorite spots, and causing them to skip the ads altogether, and working against Gaia as a whole. And I'm also wondering where the memberlist went...  

[Catani]

i agree with the menu - though that's a problem only when using the html version. when switching to flash the choices stay visible for some time

i hate the way to the guilds - i really don't understand why it's not in "my gaia" - like "subscribed threads" and "my posts" too... neutral
there are too many to unnecesary links in there overall in my opinion confused

but i really like one thing, that it's better viewable at high res... - stretches to screen width  

[Chisa]

VO and Jakobo explained some of the reasoning behind the changes in their journals, here and here if anyone is interested wink

Some important things they mentioned - the loading time is currently longer because they're forcing some files to be reloaded every time instead of cached while they're making changes (the number of users on for Christmas carolling probably isn't helping either). I'm assuming once the bugs are ironed out we'll see a big improvement in loading times, especially since the files are supposed to be smaller than before.

Other things were about the missing memberlist, my subscriptions and my guilds links, which are supposed to be included later in some special new feature.

I was never a huge fan of the maps, and it definitely wasn't the most intuitive navigation system, so I'm very happy with the new navigation. It annoys me when people complain about the maps being downplayed because they're still there to be used if they want to stay that true to them stare Now there's just a choice - especially for people with slower connections that don't want to navigate through several pages with large images to get to what they want.

I'm not really sure why they used Flash though... I don't have anything against Flash, but it is definitely less accessible. They did a good job of putting on the html/Flash option though (yay, I can have tabbed browsing again!). The Flash animations themselves aren't particularly well done in my opinion - the screenshots of avatars just aren't as nice to look at as illustrations, and the movement seems blocky and unneccessary. The bar the nested menu items are on really is very thin, and I can imagine it would be hard to use for anyone with shaky hands or eyesight problems
confused Not so great for accessibility again.

I'm guessing the header is also the reason they can't keep the avatar on the left in its old place - it can't really go in the Flash movie. Jakobo is also promising something for the avatar box on the right, so that should be interesting... at the moment it does feel very isolated, there's a few alignment issues and longer names won't fit nicely in the box. It also accentuates the ads right below it on some pages (to me anyway). They did well changing the background colour to blue and putting the lines in to make it fit in a little better and look more like its a part of the header though.

I don't mind the colours, but I don't think the background blue and the bright blue used in some of the bars are working too well together. The default text colour has also been changed to grey - I like grey, but people with poor eyesight might have trouble with it.

Everything inside the main box looks strange to me, especially the borders with the little wings, because they're flush with the outer background on the sides but not on the top and bottom confused I'd prefer it with the border going the whole way around, or adding a bit of padding so it doesn't touch the sides.

Not sure, but I think they've finally made links a more readable shade of blue whee It was so light before.

The new navigation for shops is reeeeally handy. I'm sad they cut out a lot of the artwork though, and the gradient backgrounds they have there look very cheap and unfinished =_= I'm hoping thats because it is unfinished, and they're working on a better solution.

Overall it does have less of a community feel to it... I agree that the old layout was a bit childish, but this one is a bit too corporate for the site, in my opinion. Although their donators are more likely to be old enough to have a credit card, so I guess its a smart move to try to appeal to a more mature audience.  

[That Crazy Botvinnik]

I only have a few real problems with it.

The memberlist isn't easily accessible (though I memorized the link... sweatdrop ... ), and when the page stretches, you can't see the gold count. I hate the flash, and love the option for JavaScript. I hate how Opera glitches a tad (though...that's not really Gaia's fault, now is it?), since I use it for my multis, yet everything's still accessible. I dislike how my name never aligns right. I dislike the new gold box, it's basically, just... something's annoying me about it. I also dislike all of that space on the right if I've had someone donate in my name (which I do every month), and especially how the forum text is changed to #4C475B instead of black, which I find better looking. I dislike the new navigation setup, but I like how clicking "My Gaia" brings me straight to my profile, "Community" straight to the forums, and "Games" straight to the world map. That's kinda nifty, though it should be more obvious. Lastly, in the JavaScript version of the navigation, the text is too small, and I constantly either scroll over another tab on the way to guilds, or scroll over the body.  

[Rinny Star]

I just came back from a really long hiatus so I have no idea what flaws there would be except for the 10 pages I've really run into.

All I can say is, the banner quality sucks. The image compression really shows.

 

[Aww]

Koiyuki

Like everyone else said, I think the overall look is less feminine, and more simplified then before. *though I have both Gaia bars, so site navigation was never a problem for me in the first place. xD* But also, like others have said, the design may confuse most, and frustrate those on lesser connections. *is on DSL* thus causing people to bookmark their favorite spots, and causing them to skip the ads altogether, and working against Gaia as a whole. And I'm also wondering where the memberlist went...

I'm agreeing with her. Yup, yup. Everything she's said is what I think about it too. And how I can view it, beings as I have DSL as well. xd So no affect for me. Just only that others with slower internet speed may have trouble. Now I know you have the HTML option, but still you have to click it in order to change that. xp  

[Jenudi]

[ Message temporarily off-line ]  

[Wind Dancer IX]

Tsujigiri-san

I personally like the new website styling, and I'll spare the technical stuff as that's already been taken care of. But I personally am still on a 56k connection and Gaia was slow to begin with. Now it seems almost impossible to navigate. Maybe I'm just percieving it as being slower, but the page loads seem to take forever.

I agree, I have the same speed connection and each page takes forever to load! I think it is slower than it was before...  

[Panther Nightwind]

first off, I apologize for my long absence form here >.<

Secondly, I will very bluntly say (that besides a few things about this 'upgrade') gaia's website sucks now.

I love how they've made all the shops accessible from one location. It makes it easier to get from on to another without having to go from barton town to..lets say, Durem and let the page load then click on whichever shop you wanted to go to.
The background, come on, they could have found something else to use. This one in particular (the design of it) hurts my eyes because of the intermixing blue's. I'm not sure about other gaians but I hope I'm not the only one here with this problem.
Also, they could have made this upgrade a little more computer friendly. I know how other gaians really don't like page stretching, I am also one of those gaians. Unfortunatly, I'm stuck with every page loading as a stretched page thanks to the designers placing the avatar on the right. No, I can't make my screen smaller, it still stretches the page gonk As well as, the only page that doesn't stretch for me is the 'My Subscriptions' page.
As previously mentioned, the pages load slower. Even slower for me than before this "upgrade". I'm on a dial-up, not only that but I'm stuck with using Windows 95.
Preferably, I would have (as a designer) tried fixing the items/bugs that needed fixing first before trying something new and having more bugs come out, just to have to fix those as well.

All in all, I don't see the point in this 'upgrade' at all and I feel like the money I donated to gaia went to waste.

Edit: What I mean by bugs are the really huge ones that really can't be missed but seem to only get bigger once new releases come out.

 

[Catani]

Now i don't know wheather to be happy about customization of the main page or to laugh at how dumb and really not much customisable it is

i hope it's just a betatest cause it's plain stupid - you can't even decide what will apear in what collumn and the main space, over the customizable colums , is really where a customizable space should be... =_=

but what i can't understand the most is why the hell are the subscribed threads in order when where they started and the newest ones are right on the bottom - even with my high res it's below the visibility (long list of subscriptions - but still...)