A review of the new site versus the old site
The Main Page
NEW:
The new main page is much cleaner and yet, provides access to a lot more useful stuff.
From the page you can access with a single click:
- virtually every gallery,
- the featured skins,
- the top skins (today’s favorites, 30 days, all time)
- top skinners (today’s favorites, 30 days, all time)
- featured master skins,
- newest skin,
- latest news,
- newest master skins
- recent forum posts
- featured articles
By contrast, the current site lets you get:
- virtually every gallery
- featured skin
- today’s favorites
- top master skins
- featured articles
- latest news
- recent forum posts
- poll
Of course, to get to those 8 things you need this much space:
OLD:
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s amazing that the old WinCustomize doesn’t even display the newest skins on the home page. It only displays the top 3 most popular skins of the day. You have to scroll down to see what’s new on the forums. If you want to see the most popular skins of the last 30 days you have to go through several steps on the old site.
The Gallery
NEW:
What I really like about the new gallery is that it’s now very easy to access context-relevant information like the top skinners in a given gallery and the most popular ones without having to do special sorting options.
By contrast, the right side was dominated by a parade of little icons for getting to the other galleries (on the new site, just mouse over explore just like on every page to get elsewhere). As a result, users were bombarded with a LOT of stuff, most of which was not relevant.
Skin View
NEW:
When you click on a given skin, you now has quick access to other skins made by that skinner. It’s easy to just go to the next skin in the gallery as well as an intuitive way to get back to the list of skins in that gallery (before you would have to hit the back arrow in your browser every time).
You still get instant access to all the other galleries and forum posts and such because of the universal mouse-over menu at the top.
By contrast…
OLD:
First off, note how much more screen space is needed to present less information. If you want to go to the next skin in the gallery, you have to hit back and then click on the next one. There’s no info on what other skins this author has done. There’s no easy list to see what’s popular in this skin gallery from here. The thumbnail is blurry and hard to view. Big walls of text.
SEARCH
NEW:
Click on the drop down to pick a particular gallery or search the entire site.
OLD:
Pray it works.
So those are some of the highlights of the new site. Under the covers, once the server stuff is fully configured, it should be vastly faster too but like with the old site, it will probably take a few weeks to weed out various critical paths that need to be tweaked.
