My own personal opinion aside but I was under the impression from the rapturous praise in the BA site thread that people liked the new BA website? Especially when the media abilities of the site were touted in numerous posts as an improvement?

One response:

I was thrilled someone made the effort instead of talking about it. Very happy to see players helping that project.

Of relevance to current site design here in the community:

well, how does your design change that?

eg you have "Games" and "Download" links, like the current design.
People click "Download" -> they get to the engine-only download -> "zomg i cant play this"
So that download page would need a notice "If you just want to get ready to play, you want this: Games Downloads"
So nothing is changed...

The spring website is complicated because its products are complicated.
You need all those various guides, how-to's and multiple downloads because there is no one-click-fun product. (that is really simple)

You're looking through the eyes of familiarity.

What we currently have:

• A banner with a logo
• A second banner with a different logo, and a tagline
• Learn More
• Download and play
• See the games
• A video with a menu of tabs
• Engine news
• Comunity News

Even the menu has a massive amount of redundancy, shouldn't report bugs and help be merged into some kind of 'support' page? Development can br reached from wiki and wiki can be reached from development, and games can be reached from about etc...

What my idea has:

• A small block with text/links whatever is chosen to go in by whoever has access
• A pretty backdrop with an empty region for the above mentioned block

AF, I would argue that a small "About" paragraph should be added somewhere, so that casual people passing by will have a quick answer to the question "Wtf am I?"

Go minimalism. I agree with AF.

Spring website is 2000s web design, this is how new websites look.

Edit: Where are our twitter buttons? RSS feeds?

Spring happens to be about games, and we look quite similar to most popular game official sites (lol, starcraft, wow, etc.). Probably the only ones that are different have way too much flash.
KISS is fine, just keep the news on top (even if only summaries).

Current spring home page set the bar so low that it's hard to go wrong.

Sure, if you want to look the same as the rest.. but why not try to stand out?

^is why

I think that some link consolidation as AF suggested makes sense.

What about good ole java menus?

so like

about
- wtf is spring
- games
- media
- help

Game development
- wiki on game development
- download of engine

engine development
- wiki on engine development
- bug reporting

something like that?

Starcraft and World of warcraft aren't built to attract passers by, most people already know who starcraft or warcraft is when they go there, those sites serve a different purpose. What's more they aren't game engines, they're games.

I propose that individual games should not be given super big features beyond artwork on the main site, instead specific parts of them should be cherry picked as demonstrations of what the engine is capable of.

At most give games individual subsections so they can make a pretty page with a summary and maybe a video and gallery, and a link offsite, but no more. Themed BBpress for that particular project if needs be but I don't see that being a big thing.

There's a belief here that we need to use the kudos and brand power of the engine to lift up our games and make them successful. That's like asking the homeless to pay for mortgages because the middle classes have been hit by the recession. If anything it should be the other way around.

I agree, the only thing that may stand in the way of this is:

• "I like seeing the whole wiki index but I refuse upon death to bookmark this and demand there's a direct link in the menu"
• "OMG no not an SDK oh god no, but that means we'll have to make a DSD installer?!? *screams at the slightest hint of an SDK*"

well boo hoo for them? I can use the bread crumbs like any other person wikipedia diving.

honestly for the games page, I would just link to the wiki games page.

Not sure we can get away with

"First class documentation

Our documentation is one of our most prized possessions and it is frequently updated."

But thanks - another example with actual content beyond pretty pictures.

AF, if the wiki could be converted over to wordpress, we could use it to do entire dynamically generated sitemaps, rss feeds of those pages... a WHOLE lot of very neat stuff.

Ooooh boy, I get a little moist thinking about all that we could do with a wordpress spring site. The rss feeds alone would be worth their weight in gold.

wordpress wiki: ew

TinyMCE would be a massive blessing.

Well this is the thread to suggest it.