Suggestions for the Website Home Page

Provide feedback, criticism or praise about Kitely, or suggest new features
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Koshari Mahana
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Re: Suggestions for the Website Home Page

Post by Koshari Mahana »

Alternately, you can just have someone that is a good photographer take several pictures, your choice, without user submissions, and use them as a slideshow banner.

Front images of people are good, yes, but they are not the only thing that is good. It's about variety. If you have a slideshow banner then each image, carefully chosen, can display a different aspect of what appeals to people. Everyone is different. If I see an avatar only, not doing anything other than looking pretty I am not interested, but someone else is. If I see beautiful scenery, with a variety of people in the foreground with some great architecture, that appeals to me. Maybe some folks like to see people hanging out by boats, ships, planes etc... Kitely is more than just one subject so the banner on the homepage should reflect that.

My suggestions for 5 types of banners (slideshow):
1) Some pretty people close up, nice skins, clothing, and hair (not just females, male or non-binary too). We have so many good creators that we should not have a hard time finding attractive avatars.
2) Some gorgeous natural scenery with a group of people in the foreground chatting, maybe on outdoor furniture, could be a beach, mountains, farm, it doesn't matter, just something beautiful and inviting with striking lighting
3) People hanging out on vehicles, planes, boats, ships, trains, cars, or whatever, historical or modern, either is fine.
4) A well-built a modern region, perhaps business or classroom areas w/people
5) A well-built historical region, maybe medieval, western, or fantasy, wee-folks or whatever ... again with people, maybe role-playing? ... something different from modern.

That's a pretty good variety. Slideshow banner images work well with responsive websites too and for virtual worlds in particular I see it as an asset. Large images are good and can be optimized for quick loading.
Ilan Tochner wrote:
Wed Jan 26, 2022 1:39 pm
In other words it's a lot of work to create an image that we can use and it's very likely that if we open this up for submissions then most of what we get sent won't fit our requirements, resulting in people becoming upset because their submissions were rejected. I want to avoid upsetting our most active community members and this type of project gives me flashbacks to past projects that started with a lot of good will and ended with some community members leaving even when the group achieved what it set out to do.
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Re: Suggestions for the Website Home Page

Post by Koshari Mahana »

.
Ilan, This website has a lot of good examples of sliders, some better than others. For our purpose simple is probably the best way to go. Just a basic image slider. It can be that the user clicks/touches the next arrow or swipes on a phone, or one photo fades out and another fades in automatically. I think user arrow/swipes might be best actually, then there isn't a lot of stuff going on when a person loads the website.

https://www.jssor.com/demos/
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Re: Suggestions for the Website Home Page

Post by Koshari Mahana »

Does that also mean that a person without a region doesn't see "My Worlds" on the menu bar?
Ilan Tochner wrote:
Wed Jan 26, 2022 4:19 pm
As for the order of the Go To menu. Most people don't have a Kitely Store so the My Store section should only contain a single entry for them. As for the rest, would placing the Forums 4th in the Kitely section instead of 6th really make a difference for people who are not new to our website?
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Re: Suggestions for the Website Home Page

Post by Koshari Mahana »

Dot Matrix wrote:
Wed Jan 26, 2022 3:07 pm
Next: The website is the main tool for users to manage their account, settings, worlds, market store, ... It is not just for potential customers. Might it need a bit more tweaking for their benefit? Which parts do they need to access most?
I see both as important. All new users will see the website before they even create an account. If we want more users we need to update things and put our best face forward. Function for new users and established users might be basically the same for both, I'm guessing?
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Re: Suggestions for the Website Home Page

Post by Koshari Mahana »

I'm looking again at the website and where it says our name in the upper right, why not make that a drop-down menu like Amazon and many other websites do... so that all of our user tools and account settings could be under our name if we hover or click it? That would completely get all of that into a different section, away from all of the other stuff going on in that other drop-down.

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My Store
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Re: Suggestions for the Website Home Page

Post by Dot Matrix »

Koshari Mahana wrote:
Wed Jan 26, 2022 8:44 pm
I'm looking again at the website and where it says our name in the upper right, why not make that a drop-down menu like Amazon and many other websites do... so that all of our user tools and account settings could be under our name if we hover or click it? That would completely get all of that into a different section, away from all of the other stuff going on in that other drop-down.
I was thinking along very similar lines. That would help a lot.
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Re: Suggestions for the Website Home Page

Post by Ilan Tochner »

Hi Dot and Koshari, you commented on similar things so I'll combine my answer.

My Worlds always appears for people who are logged in but isn't shown to people who are not. Similarly, when you aren't logged in the entire My Account and My Store sections aren't included in the Go to (on desktop) / hamburger menu (on mobile).

There is a lot of research about click through rates for links and menu actions based on how many clicks a user needs to do to reach them. Currently our entire site is available within two clicks with the max depth being clicking the Go to / hamburger menu then selecting the desired page. Similarly, the more options a person is given on a page the less likely they are to click on any option so adding another top-level option is not without cost. We don't want to hide important frequently-used pages in a place where people are less likely to find them but we also have to consider the effect of crowding the main navigation bar.

We can't hide the Terms and Privacy policies any deeper without breaking some consumer protection and/or privacy regulations in some of the countries we service. So while a well organized page / wizard to help you find information on our website would be great it can't come at the expense of making these two pages harder to reach.

Moving the legally required pages (Terms, Privacy, About) to be just above Contact and thus below Forums in the list is an option I'm not ruling out. It should be simple to do but I'm really not sure it will have any impact. In any case we'll want FAQ and Documentation to go above it as we want to nudge people to seek answers there first. Whether or not to place Forums above Blog is a different question and TBD.
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Re: Suggestions for the Website Home Page

Post by Ilan Tochner »

Koshari Mahana wrote:
Wed Jan 26, 2022 7:28 pm
Alternately, you can just have someone that is a good photographer take several pictures, your choice, without user submissions, and use them as a slideshow banner.
Well, the problem with that is that if we ask a good photographer to help and we don't like the result after they've spent all the time and effort creating these images then we end up alienating them, which we really don't want to do...
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Re: Suggestions for the Website Home Page

Post by Gusher Castaignede »

RE: Discord

The format and layout works better in terms of live support for everyone.
It's a gamer oriented platform but many non related game projects use it.
It has many features twitter cannot accomplish..
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Ilan Tochner
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Re: Suggestions for the Website Home Page

Post by Ilan Tochner »

Hi Gusher,

Discord is a great platform for what it does (group discussions) but it is a lot less useful as an evolving knowledge base. Most of the questions in our forums are of the How Do I / Can I do something variety and those are best handled in some forums-like format that people can drill-down into (which our forums have), preferably with good working search functionality (which is a weak spot with the forums solution we currently use). My current workaround is Googling: Kitely forums +SearchTerm (but that is far from ideal).
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