bit-tech 2017 refresh feedback: General site and forum feedback

Now clearly there's someone with some mad photoshop skillz, I can't even hope to compete .

 

Haven't read ALL previous posts, so these are probably duplicate comments:

1. 2002 called - it wants its front page back.
   
   A cluttered, non-responsive ad-fest. It looks dreadful. The number, size and positioning of ads makes it look a far less established site desperately scrambling to cover it's hosting costs - are things that bad? I estimate that 40% of UI real estate covers ads.
   
   As for the actual BT content, columns are too narrow, fonts are too small, the fluff-to-content ratio is high.
   
   I'd go far as suing/sacking/shooting the people who signed off on this.
   
   
2. Forums - cleaner overall, but too much grey-on-grey - god help our astigmatically challenged members.
   
   I wasn't a fan of the introduction of post categories (e.g. Lol/rant/motors/films/other etc) back in the day, but if we must have them, make them distinct. Colour-coding the category itself is a minimum. And there need to to be much greater contrast for the text.
   
   But not to be all negative, there are some nice new touches and the situation is very redeemable.

 

I want to start with saying that it looks like a lot of work has gone in to this, and the site was in desperate need of a refresh. Also that I'm sure you've had a lot of legacy systems to work with, and I know how bad that can be; I've done a *lot* of Web development so I really do know how bad it can be.

However, the new site looks like it was designed and built by a second year Computer Science intern (I teach them, so I know what they produce: it works but I wouldn't wish it on a prod environment). It's not the work of a professional, or at least not one that should be working unsupervised. Here is why I think that:

• Your colours are off and mismatched. There's no consistent colour scheme, especially on the forums. I'm guessing there's a bit-tech purple in the brand guidelines, but looking at the site it would be hard to tell what that is.
• You've bought into a proprietary forum system. It's probably great now but the only reason phpBB worked for so long before was that it is open source. If the company goes away or ups their prices you'll be screwed. And new features will be hard to implement.
• The design makes me feel physically unwell. The main site is way too cramped (use some white space and cut out some of the unnecessary content!) and the forum is similar. There's something about the clashing colours that does not work.
• The spacing around almost every element and the positioning of a lot of them is slightly off, or at least has no consistency.
• The use of flat colour and shading is random.
• The contrast ratio of a lot of the colours is nowhere near WCAG guidelines.
• The UX is odd, especially some of the animations. Animations are good when they add functionality and tell a story, but here they're designed to look nice, fail at that and make the site less usable.
• Hover effects are horrible on touch devices.
• There is way too much unnecessary info on the front page of the forums. Why do we need to know those stats? Or at least why are they on the front page as a key feature?
• All the old forum links are now dead. You might want to work out a way to relink everyone's bookmarks.
• The downtime. I appreciate migration took longer than expected, but that's the kind of downtime that I'd be seeking a major discount/legal action for. I guess you might be, or Scan/Asus/MSI/advertisers may be.
• I get an error when I click "View this in the forums" on articles.
• Scrolling the main site is really janky, forums are fine though.
• Read/unread in the forums is really unclear, the small icon is hard to notice.

I could probably go on, but I'll leave it there. It's probably a little harsh, but I take this stuff seriously because it's my business. I hate seeing things like this done badly. IMO most of this should have been worked out in the dev environment, and the rest by hiring competent developers, designers and UX people.

Edit: also, the alignment of the tags/titles makes it impossible to scan down a forum and read the titles. The old forum had the tags in a separate column so the start of each title was aligned down the page.

 

I also agree with all this. Especially the sacking part.

 

.... Ouch!

Just one thing though:

Previously the bit-tech forums used vBulletin, not phpBB. So they haven't gone from an open-source system to a closed commercial product; they've gone from a horribly outdated and insecure legacy version of a closed commercial system to a different, and more modern/up to date, closed commercial system.

I think the most important thing right now is getting any errors/bugs fixed. The design side of things can be fixed later, but if there are nasty critical bugs lurking around then they absolutely have to be the priority.

 

Sorry, that's my mistake.

 

Great to have B-T back, the shakes have now subsided.
Thanks for putting the Forum link on the front page back in today.

It is too white, but vastly better than the old site and I can certainly l've with it and I'm sure things will evolve and the niggles ironed out.

Thanks for all the hard work guys, it must have been quite a week

 

I apologise - you are correct. I glanced the extraneous mobo images either side of the narrow, fixed content area, and thought they were ads, but they were not. They were, in fact, more extraneous clutter.... designed to pad out a 850px, fixed width design for the <89% of visitors who have a greater resolution/typical browser width than the new content area.



The red areas are adverts, and I guesstimate at maybe 15% of the content area. Add in the background images, the wastefully-large footer with its 'Popular Companies' section (WTF?), and you are well-beyond 40%.

With so many links/headings/images on the one page, but with so little supporting content, the page has limited use in terms of SEO, and it is positively jarring to look at. Your average non-invested visitor isn't going to find their eye caught in all that clutter, and isn't going to bother wading through to see if there might be something interesting.

Of course, you need ads for ad revenue, and images can be pleasing/informative to the viewer, and advertising other content on the site helps such that this entry page isn't always also an exit page.The thing to remember is that you need to find a balance between these and actual content.

Sensitive much? Don't take this as a personal attack. Of course, I don't really think those involved should be sued/shot/sacked, but I think you need to face the fact that approach taken was a huge mistake. For a serious, established, technical website in 2017, I think you've wasted an opportunity and even taken a step backwards.

 

I appreciate that, having grafted to get this published (and whilst perfectly happy to receive constructive criticism), it can be hurtful to see all these slings and arrows... and I know we are prone to being melodramatic in our feedback..

However, don't dismiss the sickness comments out of hand. The front page will genuinely make for uncomfortable reading for most people. I image people being physically sick will be mercifully rare, but I'm certain you will have boosted sales of paracetamol and spectacles. Yes, I'm being flippant, but the message is real.

 

I don't like that sign-off... You've asked for feedback. Most of which is constructive as well.

 

Yeah, you got me. If NASA redesigned the Mars Rover, but still mixed up metric & imperial measurements, it would be bad form to raise it again, given that you already mentioned it first time around.

As I said in a previous post, it was an opportunity missed.

 

Can we bring back colour coding to forum prefixes? (For example in the marketplace it was Red = For Sale, Grey = Sold, Brown = Wanted etc)