Planet Sites are changing

[o'dium]

http://planetdoom.gamespy.com/

New site layouts, looks better in some ways. I hear Quake's will change too.

[Foo]

Too busy.

Site design nowadays seems to be about how many colours, moving objects and text areas you can cram into a viewers browser at once.

It obfuscates the content, which is increasingly becoming thinner.

Points:
1. The news articles don't start until I scroll down. That's the biggest page header ever.
2. The left-hand menu bar is useless. Instead of containing links to sections and letting the viewer drill down into the section of interest to them, and focus, it just lists everything in that area instead. There's gotta be like 200 links down the side of that page. EVERY page.
3. Consider how much of that page, in terms of square inches, is a hotlink. It's like 50%

There's such a thing as information overload, and this is a good example. Web designers need to be that... WEB designers, it takes a lot from the world of print (whitespace... anyone?) and has its own guidelines too.

[Grudge]

My god, that looks horrible. And it's shit-brown.

[Don Carlos]

It also took 14 secs to load the page. Most gamers I've met dont have that kind of attention span.

w3rd

[nomadimage]

I think they mostly change the layout for the sake of cramming more advertising in. Look at gamespot, ign...and now gamespy.

I can't stand browsing ign, its got so much shit on the homepage its unbelivebal. This new gamespy layout is pretty lame too, half the screen is ads.

[Foo]

Corporate short-sightedness in my opinion.

The right solution is to look at it from the gamers perspective, create something which is actually useful to gamers, then layer the ads you need to show into that design subtly.

Their current approach seems to be that since their sites are all fucked up and disjointed, and few people want to visit them, they'll just add tons of ads and links to pages and hope each hit gets at least a few clicks and mebbe some accidental click-throughs.

Weak.

[shiznit]

Never liked the planet sites layout, too much scripts, links and tables. This one looks pretty bad, since when does doom have brown colors?

[ajerara]

I kind of avoid planetdoom cause it just takes so long to load everything. I don't have the patience.

[r3t]

The old design was miles better. This just reeks of corporate mindedness: how can we cram as many banners on a page as possible.

[MKJ]

The old design was miles better. This just reeks of corporate mindedness: how can we cram as many banners on a page as possible.

there are a total of 2 banners on the page
practically, its only 1 banner even, since they only work if theyre combined as such

but banners are the way of the internet, sadly

[Foo]

The old design was miles better. This just reeks of corporate mindedness: how can we cram as many banners on a page as possible.

there are a total of 2 banners on the page
practically, its only 1 banner even, since they only work if theyre combined as such

but banners are the way of the internet, sadly

3 if you count the one for the D3 movie.

And if we count internal advertising as well (and why not... what does rpgplanet have to do with doom?) then you're looking at about 100 ad links if not more.

[MKJ]

thats why its a network. so you can hop sites. thats hardly advertising innit

btw is it me or is the page 15 times slower? must be some crappy code

[hemostick]

Yeah, loads slower. Feels more cluttered.
On the upside though, there's an RSS feed.

[r3t]

The old design was miles better. This just reeks of corporate mindedness: how can we cram as many banners on a page as possible.

there are a total of 2 banners on the page
practically, its only 1 banner even, since they only work if theyre combined as such

but banners are the way of the internet, sadly

ok, more precisely: how can we cram as many banner real estate on a single page as possible... those 2 banners are huge!

[Eraser]

Banners are flawed to begin with.
Why are huge banners necessary? Simple, advertisers don't pay as much for a banner anymore as 5 years ago, simply because people don't click on them.

So now to combat that they're making more, bigger, more invasive and more apparant (sounds, music, flash) banners.

Advertisers pay more for this than ordinary banners. But not too long from now advertisers will figure out that these types of advertisements don't generate more clicks either and in fact, might scare visitors away from the site. Advertisers pay less again and the circle is complete.

The cycle can only be broken by an alternative to this sort of advertisement.

[Foo]

thats why its a network. so you can hop sites. thats hardly advertising innit

btw is it me or is the page 15 times slower? must be some crappy code

But to what end?

Consider this from your perspective. You own several video game, ok. But you only ever play one at once, and usually you focus on that one game for days without switching to another game?

Therefore, from the viewers perspective, there's no function to being able to switch sites. Having a link to a page listing the rest of the sites in the network.. fair enough. But listing all of the network sites several times over on every single page of your site? Mind-numbing waste of space.

[Kat]

Banners are flawed to begin with.
Why are huge banners necessary? Simple, advertisers don't pay as much for a banner anymore as 5 years ago, simply because people don't click on them.

So now to combat that they're making more, bigger, more invasive and more apparant (sounds, music, flash) banners.

Advertisers pay more for this than ordinary banners. But not too long from now advertisers will figure out that these types of advertisements don't generate more clicks either and in fact, might scare visitors away from the site. Advertisers pay less again and the circle is complete.

The cycle can only be broken by an alternative to this sort of advertisement.

Yeah because the psychology of the approach is wrong. They should be paying for page impressions rather than per click because the adverts *are* actually working in the same way 'paper' adverts work, it creates brand awareness, which some would argue is more important; it's the pervasiveness that *should* count not the clicks.

Because they *are* click bound it means the adverts keep getting bigger and badder as you mentioned because they trying to 'force' you to click on them instead of realising that that's actually a secondary concern to the purpose of adverts.

In some ways webmasters are being ripped off becasue of the amount of space taken up by these things vs their 'per click' revenue; change that to 'page load' and you'll see a different type of advert, less invasive, on your webbling experience.

[Foo]

Indeed. After all, you can't click on adverts in magazine and be teleported to the business' headquarters.

[Kat]

Indeed. After all, you can't click on adverts in magazine and be teleported to the business' headquarters.

Don't give the marketing types ideas..!! It's already bad enough as it is!! lol.

[MKJ]

most banners are mainly paid per impression yknow. ofcourse if it clicks really bad they wont advertise on that page agian real soon. pages also tend to 'guarentee' a certain clickratio but that doesnt always hold up. its the exposion most banners are in for

im talking about graphical banners ofcourse. not sponsored links n the like

[FragZilla!]

It also took 14 secs to load the page. Most gamers I've met dont have that kind of attention span.

Huh? What did you say?