[nirvAnA]

alright guys here are some of the new site changes i've made today. as we are still a small community site, we listen alot to our members so nothing here is permanent and the site changes will always depend on the feedback we get from you!

Stuff changed:

1. split the news into two sections, so people who come to our site can keep up with the latest news now, as well as the latest SEA tournaments. previously our news was just tournament reminders which was bad imo, we are hoping to become a one stop news site as well, not to the detail of TL or gosugamers, but just enough for pple to follow all the big numerous events and have a general idea on whats going on.
2. removed quick find player list - moved it to top "features" nav bar.
3. removed the album pictures - didnt seem to be used much, got repetitive over time.
4. changed the font of posts, looks neater/cleaner.
5. the forums index no longer display on the main page
6. instead it can be displayed by clicking on the forum link in the navar!

Other issues:

new sc2sea banner?
new TGM subscription banner? (this is the one aean did)

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Lastly, i have a feeling people with 1028 resolutions and lower will feel the new layout is cramped.

View on a 1920 resolution

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View on a 1028 resolution. (Ty xpaperclip!)

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Any other suggestions/feedback welcome

[LennX]

Forums don't really need to be displayed as they are already shown on the left side. Not many other people will see the less popular threads/forums anyway unless they are looking to necro a long lost thread.

[Cute]

I like all the changes made, don't really feel like the practice partner thing was really used. Just seemed to be taking up valuable space.

I think the new layout looks pretty nice at 1920x1200, though I can definitely see how it could suck at lower resolutions.

As to the other issues,
1. I didn't even notice that the forums were at the bottom ahha. I've always used the side bar. I think they stretch the page out a bit too far vertically. I don't feel that they need to be displayed on the front page, but definitely have an option to access them on their own page somewhere else.

2. As to new banners etc, I think yes, but only if they follow a certain colour scheme. I feel like the site as a whole is lacking one, and it makes things a bit hard to look at sometimes. It's kinda blue, white, orange, yellow, grey and black right now, which feels a bit all over the place. I think a consistent format for the entire site (for example colours used for headings in articles matches those on site banner) would be awesome.

Obviously this would be a ton of work, and don't think that I'm making demands or anything xD Maybe just something to think about?

As always, keep up the good work!

Quick Comments

nirvAnA:

[Aean(:]

poll doesnt make sense, because there are 16:9 and 5:4 screens (and others uncommon ones).
eg i have 1280x1024 but someone else could have 1280x720 big difference.
also-
the banner i made was just an example of simple stuff that i think should be the banner instead of different front every word :S

- and its very uncomfortable viewing the site from a 1280x1024 perspective, everything is so squishedd making it hard to read. (so i voted no, i liked the old layout)

[PapaBigBelly]

thanks for constantly making sc2sea.com a better place

Quick Comments

Cute:

Agreed!

[xpaperclip]

Most of the changes are very positive! I especially like the removal of the quick player list. That made navigating on iOS hell.

I think the four column layout is a little cluttered, but that might be a side effect of the posts being designed for the old layout. I imagine some changes into how new posts are formatted would probably fix this, so I'm hopeful it will just get better.

Possible changes:

(1) As I mentioned before in the chatbox, slimming the left and right page padding from 50px to say 10px would reclaim 80px of horizontal space, which is not insignificant on lower width displays.

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(2) With regards to the change in layout, the major difference was going from one middle column to two, and that only affects page width, so I think the poll is still valid for comparing between that. However, Aean brings up a good point - for both layouts, on short screens (say 1024 high), the homepage is essentially taken up by the welcome message and the chatbox - you don't even see the main section. Perhaps the chatbox could start collapsed for guests?

[crAzerk]

Good job nirvana! Must have taken a long time to do the coding and stuff.
What a brilliant idea to split the front page into news and tournaments, whoever came up with that idea must have been a genius

Now the site looks much cleaner and more intuitive, with less unnecessary functions taking up space (and increasing page load time too) (such as Quick Player list, forums at the bottom, etc)

Some more suggestions/comments:

1) I love how currently the tournament details are all spoilered, (click to see more) it makes the whole column look more clean and you can see everything a glance. If you want to know more about something you can just click it, otherwise it won't clutter your screen.
This should be the standard IMO, e.g. the current BSG news post has slightly too much info, I think at most Stream/Brackets should be unspoilered, everything else inside.
And of course when the tournament is done, add a Winner: thing.

2) Forum section headings
I'm referring to General/SC2 General/ Strategy, etc.
Would putting a tiny icon next to each section name help to distinguish the different sections and make it look nicer too? At the moment it looks monotonous.
Not too much of a problem just an aesthetic issue

3) Recent Articles
Deserves a more prominent spot, though I'm not quite sure where it can go either.
Would swapping the Tournaments with the Recent Articles position be better?

4) Blogs
Blog sidebar should get one more row so my blog posts don't get knocked off the sidebar so quickly hahaha.
But yea, everything else has 4 rows, so...

[TCPLemminks]

Well I'm primarily in love with the new layout for the articles and other news, makes browsing through them so much easier.

A suggested improvement would be to have an option not to auto refresh the chat, it gets annoying to continualy scroll up to read chat.

[Dox]

Don't have anything to add except bravo! It's looking better every day.

[Next_rim]

1) sc2sea eats traffic like a monster
2) on my firefox, I can't open most inbeds. Can still read in source code D:
3) Personally, I don't like the list of all forums on the left. The nav bar button that takes me to the forums in the middle is good enough.

sc2sea also looks a lot like TL. Guess it was intended so.

[Next_rim]

Did you resize chatbox? My homepage layout is broken now.

[Aean(:]

Originally Posted by Next_rim

Did you resize chatbox? My homepage layout is broken now.

+1. we have to scroll like madmen now :{

[TAdeL2]

Definitely a fan of all the changes.

I think a banner change would be OK and yeah the GMM needs a new banner it kinda sucks but that replacement one there is not great either, probably worse.

Quick Comments

nirvAnA:

deL your original account was just a 3 day temp banned, its lifted already you can re-use it lol

[pikk0n]

I like the changes but we've got a bit of unused empty space underneath the news section which could probably be utilised better if we made the news section a tad smaller and the tournament section a bit larger. At the moment, I feel that the tournament section seems rather tiny.... Just a personal preference thing.

[|Erasmus|]

Only thing I don't like nirvAnA is you should do the widths in percentages rather than values so it will fit itself onto smaller resolutions a bit better (it shouldn't make things too much more cramped... I can zoom out once on my 1440x900 work monitor and everything looks fine, just part of the right panel gets cut off if I don't).

Nice job, though.

[FSDarkNemesis]

For me the Entire Panel is cut off on 1366 by 768 and I can't make my resolution bigger And when I zoom out on Google Chrome, it's too small for me to see.

[Aean(:]

Yeah the new homepage is annoying for people with small screens. Apparently it doesnt change with your resolution so i dont know..