in this thread I would like to point out some issues with the homepage that I’d suggest to improve. I know the following text will sound very negative and very annoying, but it is my unvarnished oppinion on the current online presentation of INovae Studios. By writing this, I don’t want to blame anybody! I know that it can be very hard to rush through the creation of an entire new homepage and just want to point out which sections would need some more love.
keeping the company page bright makes sense. Bright is more serious and you want to present your business.
The dark blue footer at the bottom is nice layout-wise, but it should be a little smaller. Also it mustn’t contain news-articles, facebook-articles, tweets, the universe and anything else.
For the Social links it is common, to use the known icons. This compresses that stuff.
Startpage
not reachable through the navigation; a user expects a home-item
content is pure blabla “The Only Boundary is Your Imagination…” and “We Are The Explorers”; Nothing on this page tells anything about INovae. This is really generic text that would fit on every company
Company Overview / Our Story
the page doesn’t tell your story. This is pure concept art
I’d suggest to get into detail on each of the sub-headings:
This page contains 1 out-dated video, that tells zero about the technology.
I-Novae Engine / Screen Shots
You are irritating the user here. The navigation suddenly is no navigation anymore. It rather launches a lightbox. It feels like the site is broken.
Community
Not much to improve here.
Maybe feature the main-menu items in the header of the forum.
News
Please do this in one column maybe with alternating image left/right
Without this being a table, the order isn’t logical. The length-shifts within a column indicate that the columns are nested in one row. The content in contrast is ordered as rows nested in columns.
Infinity:Battlescape
yes, having a sub-page here makes sense
yes, making it dark (not serious but players like it) is seems to be right too
I agree with just about everything you have said, and I would guess INovae does too. As they don’t have, but are looking to hire, a dedicated web developer I would think improving their cooperate hompage and the Battlescape page is on their to do list and just didn’t want to spend time on things like this when they had to prepare for the kickstarter. I would however think that it is necessary going forward to do something about the page now that they have the kickstarter behind them, and get more people visiting their web pages.
Also, while we are at it. The text in large font size in the blog section is larger than the line spacing making the rows of text overlap each other looking really bad on my computer running firefox on OS X.
Actually the #1 issue with the website is that it’s obsolete. It was done a few years ago in a semi-rush ( after the hacking incident ), and we never had the time to rework it as we’d like. A lot of your comments are known.
Another major problem ( which explains the lack of update news ) is that there’s no CMS. Updating the site, even for a minor news item, requires manually changing the content and reuploading the entire site. Azure doesn’t make things easy here.
Most of it is a matter of time. Going forward, we’ll address some of these issues, but even with our KS budget we’re walking on a thin line. We don’t have the funds to hire a pro web developer, so… yeah, that makes it a tough issue, until we get in a more comfortable zone.
Okay, maybe it is possible to find someone in the community who is willing to participate in improving this website. I would offer my own spare-time for stuff like Layout/Design, Content suggestion, HTML/CSS. If there was somebody who has experience with CMSs and who wants to participate in this, you are in the position that your community could donate a website to you
As per the We’re looking for a full-stack web developer to join the team! topic, I think they’re wanting a single person that can take on the whole site.
I think they’re far more likely to get quality from a handful of specialists than one generalist.
The description in that topic doesn’t mention UX or web design but I assume that’s because it’s been neglected rather than that role already being filled by existing team members. Of course, I hope I’m wrong.
Sure I could do all the stuff mentioned as well as front-end design-y stuff, but I haven’t sent my resume in because I’m hoping a unicorn has sent theirs in, and I’m hoping INS wouldn’t accept anyone other than that unicorn.
I expect the majority of resumes they’ve received are great examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
I think with the current funding, they cannot afford hiring a web-developer. What I am offering is an unpaid service. How much access I get to anything is something they have to decide, based on the fact that I might have to ask more often for stuff if I have less access.
I think the requirements are quite high for a “part-time unpaid contractor”. I was thinking about offering my services too (I do fullfill almost all those criteria, except the windoze stuff), but time is rather precious. If you are responsible for the whole thing like it suggests you’d be, then “part-time” might not be realistic either - at least not in the beginning.
I’m currently working full time as a Javascript Frontend Developer. I hadn’t worked directly in the web for some time, but I’m really eager in doing a new challenge in my free time and I really would like to support you guys with all I can, as I really love your idea.
Drop me a PM if you want my help. I’m offering you this without any charges, completely free. I can also send you a small CV if this is wanted.
I am also working as a software engineer and I am very familiar with CSS3(e.g. by using less or scss)+HTML5 and jQuery. If someone needs a CSS wizard, just ping me!
Echoing what @zwolff said, there are plenty of people, including myself who have put their hand up for the development position, and some that have even gone ahead made redesigns. I think when their ready, they’ll soon go through and select someone who best meets their criteria and is best suited towards the job.
The thing I miss most from the old forums is how we could see who all was logged in at once. Now we have to individually click on each member to reveal there last seen time. I also find Discourse software to be a struggle when trying to reveal relevant threads to post accordingly. (like this post)
I almost feel as if a new thread could be designated for this post but it’d likely get buried like so many others because the visibility would be practically nonexistent. Maybe The Random Thread could have been suitable. However, the search feature does become useful at times but the old forums had that at it’s disposal and it wasn’t even a key feature! I know the new forums are what they are but it’s just so unorganized.
I would like to say, keep the ‘corporate’ looking company site on it’s own separate current domain, but separate the game site for Battlescape into another totally separate domain like infinity-battlescape.com or something. So I-Novae studios would stay on the current domain with the typical PR, Press, Job, Company Info stuff, with an obvious link like you already have to Infinity Battlescape. But when clicking on the Infinity Link it would take you to a separate infinity-battlescape.com domain.
Also I gotta be honest, and my opinion might not really matter to anyone lol, but I absolutely despise the layout and design of these Discourse forums with a passion. I would highly recommend a CMS like XenForo (check out empyriononline.com) if you do ever decide to do a revamp. Their dev team is really ahead of the game, you can embed hundreds of media types like full imgur albums and they even have advanced stuff like 2-factor authentication right out of the box so you hopefully never have to worry about a hack ever again
Even though I have a lot of C# and web development experience, my life is crazy right now (as I’m sure you can relate) and I just can’t take on any outside hobby projects at this point.
