Looks decent... but common guys, foget about it and try getting used to this one :P

Thats exactly what my new girlfriend is saying about my Ex all the time and I still think its very poor argumentation...

/thread

Well 3.1 was more geared toward your last critique, as well as this one.

This is not true, they just released 2.0

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.

I like the colors and the arrangements.

My ideal (not that practical) would be totally customisable layout. You would have Hot Topics, Recent Threads, Poll of the Week as self-contained widgets and you could arrange the number and layout of them on the page. You obviously wouldn't be able to affect the layout within those things, but it would be more personal and get rid of content I never use.

The default would still be everything of course.

For example: I would remove Most Popular Stories (but keep Recent Headlines), remove the Prediction League as I never use it, remove Poll of the Week, and add back Recent Threads to the main page. But that's my custom layout, and others are free to add in other things like Upcoming Releases.

If gamespot jumped off a cliff...

ioi said: ... then IGN, Gametrailers, Shacknews and most other major game sites would follow them. Obviously they have done their market research and found that big banner images perform better than lists of news stories, same as our findings

Well since I can't change your mind, I'll just hope it works well for vgChartz.  Fair enough?