Shrimp
23 Apr 2005, 11:46
Hello, and welcome once again to a new UnrealZA layout :).
There are mainly 3 reasons behind this new design.
Since the forums were hacked, we changed to vBulletin. As such, we needed an UnrealZA template for the forum in vB format. It was at this point I thought a new site layout might be nice.
The wiki format of the previous site was not as successful as I had hoped it would be. A few people added some great pages with info and things, but for the most part I kept getting worried messages from people finding they could edit pages, who didn't quite understand the way wiki works ;). I ended up updating all the files, servers, etc pages myself anyway, nobody really contributed to them at all. A lot of people also found it fun to regularly delete or mess up several pages.
Bandwidth usage is a growing concern, so this new layout is really simple, the images are kept to a minimum to keep things looking nice, and the HTML is pretty simple and clean. Hopefully all of this should reduce the toll on the bandwidth.
As you can see, there are not as many sections/pages on this site, I've only retained the things people actually use. So we have servers, files, and clans. The Files page only lists the Essential Files needed for online play too, so nothing fancy there.
The home/news page is going to be beefed up a bit with some side-blocks showing quick info for newbies and people looking for quick access specific things.
The Clans page has not been written yet, but it's on the way.
All this simplification of the sections should make it much easier for newbies to get started, and oldies to find what they need. It also means less maintenance :D.
There are mainly 3 reasons behind this new design.
Since the forums were hacked, we changed to vBulletin. As such, we needed an UnrealZA template for the forum in vB format. It was at this point I thought a new site layout might be nice.
The wiki format of the previous site was not as successful as I had hoped it would be. A few people added some great pages with info and things, but for the most part I kept getting worried messages from people finding they could edit pages, who didn't quite understand the way wiki works ;). I ended up updating all the files, servers, etc pages myself anyway, nobody really contributed to them at all. A lot of people also found it fun to regularly delete or mess up several pages.
Bandwidth usage is a growing concern, so this new layout is really simple, the images are kept to a minimum to keep things looking nice, and the HTML is pretty simple and clean. Hopefully all of this should reduce the toll on the bandwidth.
As you can see, there are not as many sections/pages on this site, I've only retained the things people actually use. So we have servers, files, and clans. The Files page only lists the Essential Files needed for online play too, so nothing fancy there.
The home/news page is going to be beefed up a bit with some side-blocks showing quick info for newbies and people looking for quick access specific things.
The Clans page has not been written yet, but it's on the way.
All this simplification of the sections should make it much easier for newbies to get started, and oldies to find what they need. It also means less maintenance :D.