EPTTeamliquid Redesign - Page 4
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juliaRoberts
3 Posts
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Dantak
Czech Republic648 Posts
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disciple
9071 Posts
On May 26 2015 13:12 deth wrote: Teamliquid has been, and should be, focused almost entirely on community. News and articles are part-and-parcel of that, but your redesign puts them into the forefront, and community interaction and forums are shunted to the background. Too much emphasis on content and not enough emphasis on community or events/streams is a step in the wrong direction. Those are some interesting thoughts. I've been following a dozen of communities/news sites over the years. Not once I rushed straight to the message boards and forums to read and participate in community discussions. There's always a period of anxiety for new users when they are not active on the forums. The community aspect emerges naturally when users feel comfortable in the environment, but for that to happen you need some other incentive to visit the site on a daily basis. Now, if I'm a new guy visiting TL I would be like 'ok sure I get it, this is a community site, but give me a reason to come back every day and stay'. It's kinda like when you are 10 years old and your parents move to a new town and you have to go to a new school. You probably won't hurry up to introduce yourself and make friends - you will be scared at first. Communities become very intimate and personal over time - that's especially true for TL where ppl know each other for more than 5 years in some cases. The community matters for, well, the community. Don't get me wrong - TL should always be about that. But we also need to present more useful features for the neutral visitor, more substance so there are reasons to visit the sites daily. For all non SC sites people just visit us cause one of our great articles gets linked on reddit, but when they are done reading they just go back to reddit cause they belong there. You won't create a sense of belonging by forcing the community on people. We will need something different if we want our site to grow (or even stop shrinking), if we want to serve our own needs then yea I don't think a redesign is needed at all. | ||
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Belisarius
Australia6233 Posts
I second the guy that said white-on-yellow is an absolute no-go. I'd appreciate some more delineation between the headers on on the sidebar, and also the ones at the top. Maybe some subtle grey dividers/bars/whatever. I don't mind the white, but it could use a touch of something else. Blue/black text on white also can't help but evoke wikipedia, which you might want to be careful about. I'd be interested in a forum layout mockup as well. | ||
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Chexx
Korea (South)11232 Posts
On May 26 2015 16:50 Belisarius wrote: The ad banner will be unbelievably obnoxious in the middle of the screen. Just saying, all your cool design work goes completely out the window when the most prominent thing on the page could be some awful pink and yellow and green anime MMO thing. I second the guy that said white-on-yellow is an absolute no-go. I'd appreciate some more delineation between the headers on on the sidebar, and also the ones at the top. Maybe some subtle grey dividers/bars/whatever. I don't mind the white, but it could use a touch of something else. Blue/black text on white also can't help but evoke wikipedia, which you might want to be careful about. I'd be interested in a forum layout mockup as well. LD and LL already have an ad banner at this place | ||
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imJealous
United States1382 Posts
Also, I strongly feel that stream thumbnails on the home page are a bad call. It will cause that section to take up so much more space, that the number of streams displayed will eventually have to be reduced to compensate which is bad for the streamers. On the other hand I know that having the thumbnails will improve the number of views for the users who are displayed there, so its a trade off... | ||
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739
Bearded Elder29905 Posts
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neptunusfisk
2286 Posts
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JieXian
Malaysia4677 Posts
On May 26 2015 16:32 disciple wrote: Those are some interesting thoughts. I've been following a dozen of communities/news sites over the years. Not once I rushed straight to the message boards and forums to read and participate in community discussions. There's always a period of anxiety for new users when they are not active on the forums. The community aspect emerges naturally when users feel comfortable in the environment, but for that to happen you need some other incentive to visit the site on a daily basis. Now, if I'm a new guy visiting TL I would be like 'ok sure I get it, this is a community site, but give me a reason to come back every day and stay'. It's kinda like when you are 10 years old and your parents move to a new town and you have to go to a new school. You probably won't hurry up to introduce yourself and make friends - you will be scared at first. Communities become very intimate and personal over time - that's especially true for TL where ppl know each other for more than 5 years in some cases. The community matters for, well, the community. Don't get me wrong - TL should always be about that. But we also need to present more useful features for the neutral visitor, more substance so there are reasons to visit the sites daily. For all non SC sites people just visit us cause one of our great articles gets linked on reddit, but when they are done reading they just go back to reddit cause they belong there. You won't create a sense of belonging by forcing the community on people. We will need something different if we want our site to grow (or even stop shrinking), if we want to serve our own needs then yea I don't think a redesign is needed at all. I found that quite funny you mentioned that in the same paragraph.. Reddit is the perfect example of what you called "forcing the community on people". No one can argue that it succeeded in creating a sense of belonging. Their design is way simpler and old school, and to quote neptunusfisk "worse than super ugly" but it doesn't matter because all you see is a page full of comments with a up/downvoting system and all that jazz. It makes people want to participate. In a way the voting system is a positive reinforcement method of moderating a forum as opposed to the negative reinforcement way of banning people. The tradeoff is of course that it makes reddit messy as hell. But hey it works fantastically well for them. Making it into a fancy news site with gigantic pictures and all that reminded me of BNet 2.0. A fancy void devoid of a spirit. | ||
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Qikz
United Kingdom12071 Posts
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JieXian
Malaysia4677 Posts
On May 26 2015 18:01 Qikz wrote: I can see you've put in a lot of effort and it looks nice, but I really dislike desktop sites designed to be mobile websites. It really, really annoys me. I don't use a tablet, yes I use a mobile phone sometimes but the current theme works fine with it. It's just desktop websites who aim to mobiles mainly have made it really horrible for me to browse online recently as everything is so pointlessly big and there's less information on screen. Yes, exactly. It's entirely possible to code the site to and target different layouts for different users. In fact, it's already been done, just that the mobile version looks so similar to the desktop version that needs improvement. | ||
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Liquid`Nazgul
22427 Posts
On May 26 2015 13:12 deth wrote: Teamliquid has been, and should be, focused almost entirely on community. News and articles are part-and-parcel of that, but your redesign puts them into the forefront, and community interaction and forums are shunted to the background. Too much emphasis on content and not enough emphasis on community or events/streams is a step in the wrong direction. Hey deth can you expand on this comment? To me the design feels like it is addressing community interaction a ton by maintaining the forum topics on the left side. I don't really see what other community interaction you may be referring to. | ||
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Grettin
42417 Posts
On May 26 2015 17:05 neptunusfisk wrote: TL has always been a super ugly website, but aome people just don't like things to get better I suppouse Change is never good! Design looks alright. Wouldn't mind something new after few years. | ||
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JieXian
Malaysia4677 Posts
On May 26 2015 18:12 Liquid`Nazgul wrote: Hey deth can you expand on this comment? To me the design feels like it is addressing community interaction a ton by maintaining the forum topics on the left side. I don't really see what other community interaction you may be referring to. You should take a look at reddit. Their OP picture/video is shorter that your AD banner, and all you see are the comments. This redesign is making the picture cover the entire page. | ||
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disciple
9071 Posts
On May 26 2015 17:39 JieXian wrote: I found that quite funny you mentioned that in the same paragraph.. Reddit is the perfect example of what you called "forcing the community on people". No one can argue that it succeeded in creating a sense of belonging. Their design is way simpler and old school, and to quote neptunusfisk "worse than super ugly" but it doesn't matter because all you see is a page full of comments with a up/downvoting system and all that jazz. It makes people want to participate. In a way the voting system is a positive reinforcement method of moderating a forum as opposed to the negative reinforcement way of banning people. The tradeoff is of course that it makes reddit messy as hell. But hey it works fantastically well for them. Making it into a fancy news site with gigantic pictures and all that reminded me of BNet 2.0. A fancy void devoid of a spirit. I've been reading reddit for quite some time now - without upvoting or commenting in any posts. Reddit is my news source for a lot of things and I don't care about participating in the community. And while on the subject of reddit the upvote system does present content in useful manner - even for outside users. With TL thats absolutely not the case - the left sidebar has no continuity and sometimes the thread titles lack in context (when was the OP made, how many comments it still has, what its relevancy now), in fact a lot of our general community discussion happens in mega threads. Do you think opening a thread with 200+ pages is any good for a new user? Reddit is great to keep up with stuff even if you are not a diehard reading every single OP, with TL thats just not the case and that has nothing to do with the community. | ||
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Supter
France382 Posts
On May 26 2015 16:32 disciple wrote: Those are some interesting thoughts. I've been following a dozen of communities/news sites over the years. Not once I rushed straight to the message boards and forums to read and participate in community discussions. There's always a period of anxiety for new users when they are not active on the forums. The community aspect emerges naturally when users feel comfortable in the environment, but for that to happen you need some other incentive to visit the site on a daily basis. Now, if I'm a new guy visiting TL I would be like 'ok sure I get it, this is a community site, but give me a reason to come back every day and stay'. It's kinda like when you are 10 years old and your parents move to a new town and you have to go to a new school. You probably won't hurry up to introduce yourself and make friends - you will be scared at first. Communities become very intimate and personal over time - that's especially true for TL where ppl know each other for more than 5 years in some cases. The community matters for, well, the community. Don't get me wrong - TL should always be about that. But we also need to present more useful features for the neutral visitor, more substance so there are reasons to visit the sites daily. For all non SC sites people just visit us cause one of our great articles gets linked on reddit, but when they are done reading they just go back to reddit cause they belong there. You won't create a sense of belonging by forcing the community on people. We will need something different if we want our site to grow (or even stop shrinking), if we want to serve our own needs then yea I don't think a redesign is needed at all. That's true. But this is something I like about TeamLiquid (and this is coming from a low participation user). It feels like the old days of the internet. I don't feel like there's a community on Reddit because not everybody feels the urge to post quality content. You just point content. Here, you have to make that little step toward the community. No shitpost. As someone pointed out, "Double sidebars is a thing of the past". Why would it be ? I like to have a quick views of the trending threads in the forum AND the events/streams both on my screen. I need these informations all the time on my screen, plus the news/part of the forum I currently want to watch. I like to have this small entry fee for new user. It isn't that hard to join in and blend in, but you need to make a small effort. And I think that this is good for what TL.net wants to accomplish. It's not about having a huge community (and don't misunderstand me, It can be really great, and I'm an avid Reddit user), it's about having a quality community. I'm all for a redesign of TL, but not with the goal of mindless expension, and keeping in mind what makes this website so great (including the easy access to absolutely everything) Edit : However, Discipline's last point is really true. But the whole site doesn't need an entire redesign. | ||
Destructicon
4713 Posts
First I like the current color pallet of TL a lot more, I get that the predominately white is cleaner and sorta gives it a more modern look, but it just doesn't feel TL any more. I kind of like the live streams section, but it can probably be compressed a bit too make room for the calendar and upcoming events. I think removing upcoming events in particular would be a huge mistake as it makes it easy to, at a glance, figure out how to plan/manage your time to consume what content. I like the featured articles section is expanded and adds room for a bit of a description, but I'd split that into two sections, Featured Articles as well as Spotlight (for the community news). TLDR I sorta like some aspects of the new design, like giving the big front page news and featured articles more love, but I dislike the new color pallet and the removal of certain features like calendar and upcoming events. | ||
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Dingodile
4139 Posts
If I visit a website with forum, I always appreciate no white color (stressful for eyes). The redesign seems to have more space with white color than the current one  If I watch a stream over current TL site, TL site is slightly expanded. I hope this doesnt happen anymore on new TL site. | ||
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Jvattic
Germany24 Posts
Feel free to contact me if you want to talk a little more. Alright, there's a lot to say about this so I will try to work it in the same order it is shown on behance. 1.What exactly is "liquidpro" ? How will this structure be implemented? (1 Site with sub-pages? 6 Sites interlinked with each other? ...) 2. Where do the colors come from and why do you need so many of them? You should chose 1 per site. 3.There's a lot of basic stuff on the pages themselves that I don't really like, such as: Two menu bars positioned like this is too much and a little outdated nowadays. It destroys any kind of usability and easy orientation that you tried to establish by restructuring teamliquid. Use one Menu and make it work. Also give it more space, the one to the left feels tiny and cramped. Both lack any sort of visual guidance and contrast, they feel tiny, get squashed by the content and it takes a while to find what you are looking for. (This may be where you'd want to put color, a bigger font, less text, more space!! or some sort of graphic element.) Gray Boxes for article teasers are not a good idea. It's apparently the only place where you've got color in the background, thus making these little boxes the most important thing on the screen and while also reducing readability by a lot. The typografie is all over the place: In article teasers on the main page: The line spacing of the serif headline font is too narrow while the subline spacing is too wide (I assume it's the same for both, if so, you might want to have a look at the font sizes) Also I have no idea why you use a serif font for headlines in the article teasers, but switch to a sans serif upper-case for the actual articles. Font size of main Teaser and the ones below seem to vary. Make them the same. Mobile seems ok. | ||
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Faust852
Luxembourg4004 Posts
The futur of web design is not how much effect you can add on an item on a website, but the less you can get to get thing clean. I also love all the webkit stuff from css3. All in all, I really like you design. | ||
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