Ryzom.com Website

[kibsword]

Loooove the new site!!!

Looks shiney and I love the video on the homepage, should help attract new players =)

*huggles nevrax*

[kostika]

next gripe: resolution! the page is 91 pixels too wide for a proper 1024x768 screen (+(20-50) for the scrollbar) and thus forces vertical scrolling.

The page is lovely. But I'll have to agree with Xenofur about the horizontal scrolling. Even with the window maxed I have alot of scroll to see the menus on either side. Really take away from the page. I also run at 1024x768 res, but alot of people still run at 800x600 res. The horizontal scroll will be even worse for them. (and yes ALOT of people run at 800x600 res)

Either make the page dynamically resizing, or take about 30pixels out of the middle area. Either should solve the scroll problem.

[ajsuk]

I can see where that bug tracker would come in useful for the real developers but I dont think I can be arsed to deal with using that everytime I wanna make a comment.

Though I do take some time to read articals/forum posts about the game I dont like spending that much time on it unless its play time.

[legokid]

*fires Fire Ball into the air and make it explode*

A very nice site and i mean very very nice. The race movies extremely nice I cant wait for R2 and the new website to be finished.

Keep up the great work

//Windra

[blaah]

maybe someone whos registered in bugtracker, could insert one thing there...

that damn vertical scroll is 3km long. dump the news section

ty

[dazman76]

The new site looks great, but it it's definitely info overload - granted there is a lot to learn about Ryzom, but if possible it needs to be tidied away under meaningful headings (I know this is tricky from experience).

As far as resolutions go, please don't redesign the page for 800x600 viewing - 1024x768 is the minimum a web developer should design for - pages that actually fit in 800x600 look horrible, and *always* create vast vertical scrolling if they contain a fair amount of information. Apologies to people running 800x600 - you really need to move up. If you're running a Palmtop or similar, then you should expect the majority of info websites to require scrolling anyway, and possibly both directions. Palmtops and similar are not designed for viewing large documents. If you have a machine capable of higher res but you're monitor is limiting it, you need to pawn a family member and get a new monitor If you have a machine that's *not* capable of higher, then read the website on the machine that runs Ryzom - because I can't think of another reason you have only 800x600, and if you're running Ryzom that particular machine (video card etc.) *must* be capable of at least 1024x768

Bottom line - blog sites can be any size you like, sites packed with info deserved to be designed with 1024x768 as a minimum. If possible, provide sites for 'mobile' users seperately - then the people stuck at 800x600 for other reasons can also view the site properly. Whichever way you design a page, if it contains a fair amount of info, it will have to scroll - and not all designs work well in avoiding horizontal scroll - the more you squash content horizontally the more it has to expand vertically, and that really achieves very little - except making the site horrible for 75% of it's visitors.

It may be worth squishing the homepage, and using a different template for the rest - but I don't favour that approach, because it's inconsistent for the visitor. First impressions are important, second impressions are equally important if you want to get people interested.

People may run 800x600 for games, but if that's their Desktop resolution too, something is very wrong, or they're using a Palmtop

I agree with Jayce - GIF is not the best way to show a movie at all. It creates two of my pet hates as a programmer - the never-gets-to-100% progress bar for loading the page, and the 'app busy' small egg timer in Firefox, even when focused on another tab that isn't loading. Being a web developer I know what's going on - other visitors will be wondering why the page hasn't finished loading, and never does. Flash is definitely preferable here (file size/quality should still be good), what's more important is a *way to stop the movie* Also, based on experience, the movie is *much* longer than most homepage movies - they tend to be maybe 10-30 seconds, so making the movie link to another longer movie on a different page (or several movies) would be better.

I'm not sure about the 'top bar' containing the links and sever status. Again linked to info overload, it gives the feeling of 'stuff to click everywhere' to the visitor, and that's best avoided - at least on the home page. A website should preferably form a 'pyramid' heirarchy of pages, as closely as possible. When you have a huge number of links on the homepage, this means most of your content is directly underneath on the next 'level' of the heirarchy - it's nice for people to have lots of content to see, but you don't need it all accessible from the beginning. Strong categorisation of info helps the user, 50+ links on a single page does not

[rundll32]

great site - god awful loading time

[geezas]

It takes my box 10 secs to load it up, that is a bit on the long side. But it is a testing site, and it probably has all sorts of debug routines enabled ?

[ladattas]

If you use movies of any format, I suggest leaving them as an option in the media section of the site, that way people who want to see either movies or screen shots will get their choice. The bullet-like listing of the features could be condensed and then expanded into another page onto itself called features. To get new players though, it will take mostly ease to find all of the information to make the sale stick.

For example, if you are having a promo-presentation on your front page, then news shouldn't be on the same page since it adds unwanted scrolling to the page itself. It's really hard to find that happy middle with that, but I would suggest starting with three variations for everyone to try out. But, I will end this post with one good point; you made a better and concerted effort compared to SOE's webpage for EQ2, which is either outdated [due to patch/combat updates] or missing pages. I got none of those, so I say you're on the right track. Keep up the good work.

-- Bridget

[kibsword]

I like having the vid on the front page, if potential players visit the site and see the video, it will make them more likely to try the game. However, an optional stop option for those on 56k etc perhaps may be appropiate (perhaps set so that if logged in, your account will remember the setting).