I had another go at tinkering with the home page layout. I took heed of what was said last time round and looked around at some other wiki designs.
I found that using sort of boxed content portals around an image is a popular one. The boxes match the main categories and I used some of the official forum avatars for images. The images are no bigger than 80px, which is only slightly bigger than was recommended so they're not too distracting when reading.
I was thinking we could do away with the scroll box news layout as most announcements are found as you log into the game in the launcher window. There is still a box for listing links and/or summary for any game updates etc.
Now we have tooltip links for items, we could list any new items when people create them (thinking ahead to private servers)...thought that might be cool
see Sandbox.
any thoughts?
---Ash 10:33, 8 April 2014 (EST)
Looks really good. Only feedback I can give is that I like having the article count and image count right up at the top of the page - and in your redesign its way down at the bottom. Maybe we could mix up the colors of the header bars too. --An Adventurer 11:55, 8 April 2014 (EST)
Another thought I had: What if instead of using the forum avatars, we stuck with using the smaller 32x32 in-game edited icons? The About Asheron's Call Community Wiki section at the bottom of the page uses 32x32 icons, and I don't think it looks too bad.
I like the color changes you've made. Perhaps we could carry those color themes over to some of the pages in that category.
--An Adventurer 23:49, 9 April 2014 (EST)
Edit: I gave the smaller icon thing a shot in my sandbox. I didn't have icons for everything, but it gets the idea across.
--An Adventurer 05:00, 10 April 2014 (EST)
All the changes you've been making to the sandbox lately are looking good. The only issue I see with it at the moment is that, at lower screen resolutions, the create new page area of the Contributor's Corner don't stay aligned to their sides. It might be an issue for some, even with larger monitors, if they don't keep their browser window maximized. And, on a more sad note, I'm not sure how much use those create new page objects are going to get, since we aren't going to be getting any more new content updates :\
Anyway, do you think we are ready to roll out with this new homepage design, or are you still working on it?
--An Adventurer 01:22, 18 April 2014 (EST)
Hiya
I changed back to icons as I agree that they look better also, the art for the story characters are kind of overused now anyway. I looked through the AC files for some art or other images to use but I couldn't see anything worth cropping that would like nice on the layout.
You mentioned carrying the color themes over to pages, did you mean like this sort of thing?:
Return to Character
Return to Items
Return to Quests
I also deleted the old navigation template for the main categories and added a simple one to MediaWiki:Anonnotice. I spotted this idea on another wiki - it's a system message that appears on everypage for users that are not logged in. You can also do it for users that are logged in, but I figured that anyone logged in as a user at this point is probably a contributor and will likely have java enabled for the sidebar.
Yeah, the create pages are a little late in the day lol, but I thought even if we don't get big updates ever again, people may want to use a copy of this wiki for their private servers if the wikkii mirror doesn't get used and that it may be helpful. I think someone was intending to do something like that before as we have the extensions installed for it.
I think I managed to center those floats if they stack at lower resolutions now. I'll just go ahead and change the homepage now.
Thanks for the feedback. =D ---Ash 03:42, 18 April 2014 (EST)
- You mentioned carrying the color themes over to pages, did you mean like this sort of thing?:
Return to Character
Return to Items
Return to Quests
Yes, that is exactly what I was thinking :)
- I also deleted the old navigation template for the main categories and added a simple one to MediaWiki:Anonnotice.
What was the old navigation template?
--An Adventurer 04:47, 18 April 2014 (EST)
There were a few of them like these Template:Player Character Links, Template:Gameplay Links ---Ash 07:50, 18 April 2014 (EST)