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        Arimaa >> Site Discussion >> New home page
        
(Message started by: omar on Jun 9^th, 2006, 1:20am)

Title: New home page
Post by omar on Jun 9^th, 2006, 1:20am

In another thread Jean had suggested the possibility of changing the Arimaa home page to focus more on the game and especially changing the slogan.

http://arimaa.com/arimaa/forum/cgi/YaBB.cgi?board=talk;action=display;num=1147391069

I had agreed that it needed a change and said I was open to suggestions. In my spare time (which has not been much lately) I've made a new home page which I think is much more focused on the game and will perhaps draw more people players and fans to the game. Here it is for everyone to preview and give their comments and suggestions.

http://arimaa.com/arimaa/introArticle/new.html

The final version will still have the navigation links on the left.

Title: Re: New home page
Post by seanick on Jun 9^th, 2006, 3:46am

I think it does look better than the current front page.

a couple thoughts:
Could there be some form of active content, like current standings/tourney schedule? maybe just the game room logon fields somewhere.

have you considered not using frames for the front page? one of the things I like about your new design is that it doesn't have the left pane. maybe something like how http://kgs.kiseido.com looks.

Title: Re: New home page
Post by unic on Jun 9^th, 2006, 10:30am

I agree that this looks like an improvement over the current front page.

How about lifting forward the gameroom more though? That might tempt more people to actually try the game out.

Also, if it were me, I would swap the order of the "Some featuress which make it difficult for computers and challenging for AI programmers include:" and "Some features which make it highly competitive and interesting for human players include:", as I think the features which make it interesting for humans are more important in the long term for the game to keep growing.

Title: Re: New home page
Post by chessandgo on Jun 9^th, 2006, 5:51pm

on 06/09/06 at 03:46:55, seanick wrote:

Could there be some form of active content, like current standings/tourney schedule? maybe just the game room logon fields somewhere.

Yes; excellent idea to stress the upcoming events !

on 06/09/06 at 03:46:55, seanick wrote:

maybe something like how http://kgs.kiseido.com looks.

Yeah !! exactly ;)

Title: Re: New home page
Post by omar on Jun 11^th, 2006, 3:16pm

Thanks for the suggestions guys.

I've swaped the order of the "features which make it difficult for computers ..." and the "features which make it interesting for human players". With the majority of the audiance for this page being the general public, this order seems better.

Added a table of events that have happened in the past year. I will also announce future events here as they become concrete.

Added a the left navigation bar, but as an iframe instead of a regular frame. So this avoids the problems with frames.

Decided not to put the gameroom login on the front page since there is already a 'Gameroom' link in the navigation bar. Also this page is intented more for people who don't know the rules yet.

Title: Re: New home page
Post by seanick on Jun 12^th, 2006, 12:53am

in that case, I like the content of this page: http://arimaa.com/arimaa/learn/http://arimaa.com/arimaa/learn/
more than I do the content of the current front page. (and the middle info on the new front page).
I think it just reads a little too Resume' like for me.

Also when the main window is not full screen, the page doesn't reflow correctly, the image takes precedence and the title is all the way off the screen. maybe my monitors are too small, but they are 1280 x 1024 which I think is fine for most things.

Still a spelling error on "featuress", and I think the "gameroom" link should be a different color, or larger text, or something.

Definitely getting better though!

Title: Re: New home page
Post by omar on Jun 12^th, 2006, 9:16pm

I made the game image a little smaller. See if that looks better for you. I tried it with screen settings of 1024x768 and it looked OK in both IE and Firefox. Although IE pushed the middle content down if I resized the window and made it too narrow. Firefox handles it much better.

Yes, the main page does look a little like a resume, but I think that's OK because it convays all the important things quickly while providing links to more details. The 'Rules' page is linked at the top of the naviagtion bar and in the main content.

Title: Re: New home page
Post by chessandgo on Jun 12^th, 2006, 11:38pm

wow ! this page looks good to me ! but what do I know ? ....

I'm just a bit shocked (even if pleased, believe me ;) ) to see my name almost more than the one of robinson ... I think the Wchamp would deserve a bigger police size ! (and maybe the champ bot as well)

a typo at "prediction contest"

Title: Re: New home page
Post by seanick on Jun 13^th, 2006, 10:44am

This looks better yet, and does fit in the default window size. I think the main reason my browser windows show up so small is because of the size of the flash client window. so maybe if the flash window were larger it wouldnt have been a problem, but either way it looks better now anyway.

The only remaining complaint I have is that the Gameroom link is sort of obscure unless you know what you are looking for. I DID know what I was looking for and it still took me a minute to find it. but if you want to stick with the one color/text style scheme, then could it be the first link in the list?
I say switch it out... the new one is ready to be the main page!

Title: Re: New home page
Post by Fritzlein on Jun 13^th, 2006, 3:00pm

I like the new page because it is much more about Arimaa and less about the game's invention, chess, Deep Blue, and other things. I love the references to the community and events: many great games aren't supported by an active community and nice game server like Arimaa has. It's great for newcomers if they can jump right into a great place to play rather than merely encountering Arimaa in the abstract.

A few small edit suggestions to consider:

* Perhaps put dates inside the news headlines, e.g. "chessandgo is the player of the month for May"

* Remove the point about " A more level playing field against computers" from the section on what makes it fun for humans. There's enough talk about difficulty for computers in the following section.

* Change all the headings of the form "[...] features which make it highly competitive [...]", into "[...] features which make Arimaa highly competitive [...]". I think helps rather than hurts to repeat the name of the game over and over.

* "Less tactics and more strategy" is a bit strange. First, for a countable noun like tactics, it should read "fewer tactics" instead of "less tactics". However, it isn't clear whether it is supposed to be fewer tactics than some other game (in which case the baseline game for comparison should be mentioned) or whether the importance of strategy relative to tactics being touted (in which case it could say, "Good strategy is more important than good tactics"). My own sense is that the challenge for programmers isn't that Arimaa is non-tactical; the challenge is that there is a low density of captures, so material evaluation can't be relied upon as heavily as in chess.

Maybe I'll post a few more quibbles later, but on the whole I like the "feature list" more than the previous home page.

Title: Re: New home page
Post by chessandgo on Jun 13^th, 2006, 5:06pm

on 06/13/06 at 15:00:13, Fritzlein wrote:

* "Less tactics and more strategy" is a bit strange.

Good point Fritzl, even in itself I don't see why arimaa is less tactical than any other game ... chess included ...

Title: Re: New home page
Post by omar on Jun 17^th, 2006, 4:04pm

Nick, I've added a 'Play Now' link right below the slogan which goes to the gameroom. So it should be very easy to get to the gameroom now.

Thanks for the suggestions Karl.

* Added the month to the 'player of the month' announcement.

* After a bit of contemplation about removing "A more level playing field against computers" I decided to remove it temporarily. I think humans finding interest in being able to defeat computers more easily is a distinct point worth mentioning though the reasons I gave were similar to what makes the game harder for computers and making it look redundent. Need suggestions as to how to word this better.

* The "less tactics" is intended to mean less than other games such as chess, checkers, and other games of a similar size, but I didn't want to get into those details as it might offend some people. The intent of these points is just to spark curiosity. But I should still link that back to something; which I've done now.

Jean, click on that link and see what you think.

Title: Re: New home page
Post by chessandgo on Jun 17^th, 2006, 6:12pm

on 06/17/06 at 16:04:08, omar wrote:

* The "less tactics" is intended to mean less than other games such as chess, checkers, and other games of a similar size, but I didn't want to get into those details as it might offend some people. The intent of these points is just to spark curiosity. But I should still link that back to something; which I've done now.

No offense to anyone I'd say. I still think that arimaa is as tactical as any other game, the fact of being tactical being no drawback at all :) But anyway, maybe you're right.

Title: Re: New home page
Post by seanick on Jun 17^th, 2006, 6:46pm

I like it.

one more idea: switch out which game is featured once a week or so? but that is just a thought, if it is too much work to implement it, then don't bother- it is not critical.

Even as it is now, I think we have a unanimous "this page is better than the current front page".. everyone, a show of hands?

Title: Re: New home page
Post by Fritzlein on Jun 18^th, 2006, 10:22pm

The "play now" link was a suberb idea. Some people don't want to read about games (not even the rules!), they just want to get started playing.

Title: Re: New home page
Post by seanick on Jun 19^th, 2006, 10:11am

I agree (re: play now). It's annoying now to go to other sites and not see that link, anywhere on the front page. Maybe it is a good idea for people to read the rules first but being the type that only reads the manual once something is already broken, hoping to find info on how to fix it, I haven't exactly got the right mindset to study something BEFORE playing. :)

I noticed the front page is switched out. Looks a lot better IMHO.

NICK

Title: Re: New home page
Post by Mathias on Jun 19^th, 2006, 2:55pm

I just wanted to add that I'm always willing to update my German translation. It contains some of the old stuff, so we might update these pages as well. However, the translated pages haven't been the same as the Arimaa home page then, so let me know what exactly to translate.

Mathias

Title: Re: New home page
Post by nbarriga on Jun 19^th, 2006, 2:56pm

I found a bug in the homepage when viewing in opera 9 (i haven't tried 8.54, but i guess it's the same).

Here is the screenshot: http://www.alumnos.inf.utfsm.cl/~nbarriga/arimaa.jpg

Title: Re: New home page
Post by Fritzlein on Jun 19^th, 2006, 3:41pm

on 06/19/06 at 14:55:46, Mathias wrote:

I just wanted to add that I'm always willing to update my German translation.

Woah, cool! Omar, maybe you could fly a miniature German flag on the home page so German-speakers would click on it and get linked to Mathias' translation.

Title: Re: New home page
Post by nbarriga on Jun 19^th, 2006, 4:35pm

I just noticed there already is a menu to select the language, and the spanish version is awfull. I will translate it this week when i have some time and send it to omar as soon as possible.

Title: Re: New home page
Post by Fritzlein on Jun 19^th, 2006, 5:01pm

Haha, I totally missed the language menu. Yes, it would be great to get updates of the out-of-date pages in different languages, but maybe also the language selector could use some work.

When I'm at a non-English site, I look for a flag of England or the U.S. to click on. If there isn't a picture for me to click, then how will I know what to do? I have no idea what is Spanish for "Select Language", so I couldn't read instructions telling me how to get to the English page if they were there!

Title: Re: New home page
Post by nbarriga on Jun 19^th, 2006, 9:16pm

Usually, the menus have the languages in the original languages. I'm confused, so here's an example:

English
Español
Français

Title: Re: New home page
Post by Mathias on Jun 21^st, 2006, 6:44pm

on 06/19/06 at 14:56:28, nbarriga wrote:

I found a bug in the homepage when viewing in opera 9 (i haven't tried 8.54, but i guess it's the same).

It also appears in 8.54. The bug can be overcome by not only assigning the table cell and the iframe height=100%, but also the table itself and the table row, thus:

<table border=0 cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 height=100%>
<tr height=100%>
<td height=100%>
<iframe src="navbar00.htm" frameborder=0 align=middle width=100 height=100% xscrolling=no></iframe>
</td>

instead of

<table border=0 cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0>
<tr>
<td height=100%>
<iframe src="navbar00.htm" frameborder=0 align=middle width=100 height=100% xscrolling=no></iframe>
</td>

should work fine. Tested with Opera 9.00. I don't know if this is a bug in Opera or in the website code, but then, the HTML is not valid anyway...
Also, I only confirmed that it "looks good" (at first glance) in Opera 9.00, not in other browsers, and I don't know if it breaks other things. Beware... ;)

Mathias

Title: Re: New home page
Post by omar on Jun 25^th, 2006, 2:42pm

Thanks for the HTML patch Mathias. I've included it and it seems to work OK with FireFox and IE as well.

I like the idea of using flag icons for different language translations. As far as what to translate, I think the new main page and the Javascript tutorial page should be enough.