| ioi said:
No 300x250 ad at the top right, most popular news is too big, no recent headlines, chart bars want to be at the top, no news rotator, colours still far too bright, big ad in the middle of the page doesn't work, etc etc |
Here's the content that's on the homepage organized from most imoprtant to least important:
- 1) Chartz Widget - This is why everyone from the most infrequent visitor to the daily visitor comes to the website, to see the status of the consoles.
- 2) Hardware and Software Sales - This is what your weekly/semi-regular visitors are coming to see. They don't just want the totals, they want the the latest information on their favorite games.
- 3) News/Recent Headlines/Most Popular Stories - This is what the regular and daily users want to see.
- 4) Forum stuff (Hot Topics, Prediction League, Poll) - This is what the forum crowd want to see. Doesn't matter where this stuff is as they'll find it.
- 5) News rotator.
The news rotator should go away IMO.
The people who only come for the sales and weekly sales figures don't care about the news. They see their numbers and leave. The people who come for the news scroll down to the stories and recent headlines right past the rotator. Why should they sit and stare at a flash rotator for 30 seconds when there are 30+ articles below they can be clicking and looking at right now?
Rotating images and the like are good for a lot of websites and they add some character, however when you have a website with 10+ content items just on the homepage already competing for space, you don't need more character. You need more space.
Even worse, not only is the rotator likely to be the least useful element on the page (next to the poll), it's also one of the two most memory intensive parts of the page. Cutting off the rotator and the chartz widget cut Firefox's memory usage by 25%. We can give the Chartz widget a pass since it is quite easily the most important element on the page, but the news rotator is not.
Cutting out the rotator would make the webpage load faster, use less memory (resulting in a better browsing experience), and make room for more important content.
