2. Site width. As explained initially, less than 10% of users view the site at a width of less than 1280 pixels. The decision to go with 1150px meant that we could make news articles wider, same with the central pane on game pages, forum posts and so on. With the control panel width now fixed, ad widths fixed, the header and footer fixed, it is going to be very difficult to make the site narrower again. If it is just forum pages that cause problems we can try to play around with anchors so that the page automatically scrolls to the far right when you enter a thread, only covering the 160 wide ad and recent threads box on the left side. I know that probably isn't idea either and even 10% of 30k people per day will be a lot who may be unsatisfied but you have to move on at some point. I use a laptop at 1680x1050 and on most sites it seems such a total waste to have 300 pixels of black space either side that is totally unused. This is still something I am thinking about how best to tackle.
10% is 120 users at any given time on the site (currently there are 1223 people on the site right now). That's a lot of people that the new format is affecting. That alone should have made the team rethink the new width.
3. The black colour scheme. When we moved over to the old site from the original grey and white we quickly had accusations of Wii bias thrown our way and people asking why we use blue. The old site was designed in about 2 hours with very little thought. Blue and white is about as basic as you can get and I fancy a change. Many sites successfully use the dark look and it works well with images and ads - looks far more professional than a white box with some kind of border and some black text. We wanted to move away from showing bias towards one particular console so decided to go with black and orange as the neutral colours with everything colour coded to the blue, green or red of the consoles. On the whole I think the idea works really well and as you guys get used to it I hope you will too.
I'd like to know what "professional sites" you visit because none of the sites I visit on a regular basis that are "professional" have black color schemes. In fact only the non professional kids sites have color schemes like this.
Also you said you were trying to get away from people saying the site has a bias towards the Wii... well then why would someone change the logo to include an xbox 360 controller? Wouldn't that kinda mean something as well?
Prepare for termination! It is the only logical thing to do, for I am only loyal to Megatron.
