Suggestions for the Website Home Page

[Koshari Mahana]

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I just have two small suggestions and I'll explain why I think they are important changes to make to the website home page.

1) If we put the link to the "Forums" on the top bar instead of in the drop-down menu, people who are new would easily be able to find and use the forum. Community is what will really help Kitely grow. I do realize that the forums are one of the 4 things that pop up on our viewers when we log in. But what about people who aren't opening their viewers and are just in the beginning stages of checking out Kitely to see if it's interesting? I know when I started I had a hard time finding the forums and that's the time when I needed them the most. There is another forum link if you scroll all the way to the bottom of the webpage but again, that's hard to find. I really feel that if we can build community, using every tool at our disposal, it will help our growth. As it is, not enough people use the forums and it's a place we can use more to connect with other users.

2) The image on the front page for the banner image is very old and outdated. We have so many better-looking avatars, clothing, and scenery available now. The homepage is the very FIRST thing people see when they come to our website, we want it to be as attractive and functional as possible but we also need to wow them with interesting banner images that make them want to join and be a part of Kitely. I suggest that you have a submission call-out, specify the size for the banner and have people send the photos (taken inside Kitely) by email. Then pick about 5 or so and use them for the banner as a slide show, fading from one to the other. A mix of many residents having fun at an event or hanging out, gorgeous builds, beautiful environments, and avatars. We have to show off the BEST of us for the optimal first impression.



Thanks for your consideration!
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[Koshari Mahana]

Thank you for the suggestions Koshari.

The website is a responsive design that automatically moves elements around based on available page width on the user's device and current browser display size. There isn't enough space to add the Forums link to the top bar in some common display factors without moving a different top-level menu option into the Go to menu.

The current main options of Services, Explore Worlds, My Worlds and Market are the most commonly used parts of our website. It's of course possible that this is biased by them being placed in the top menu but even so I don't consider any of these pages to be less important than the Forums. We could theoretically place the Forums link on the top bar when there is space but that will raise a lot of questions when people can't find it because their current display settings don't provide enough space to do so. We've dealt with similar issues before and found that inconsistency of available options for different people and/or based on what devices they are using has a high cost in terms of customer support and customer satisfaction.

As for the banner image, I agree it's quite outdated by now and that what you suggested for replacing it can work. However, doing so creates a high risk of alienating people whose images weren't selected for display. Community group projects have always ended up costing us some of our most valued community members, even the most successful projects that resulted in the creation of great value for the people who use our service. People's egos get hurt, or disagreements arise between community member as to what should be done, or some people don't agree with some of our priorities or timelines. The end result is some people quietly or loudly taking their avatars and moving away. I've experienced it time and again which is why I'm no longer eager to run such community projects.

[Dot Matrix]

Koshari does have a point, especially with respect to the remoteness of accessing links to the forum and other sources of more up to date information and help.

Could I suggest looking at the order of items in the "Go To" submenu? How many times the different entries are looked at, and maybe restructure the menu to reflect that?

As for the banner image, what about simply changing it to one showing the Kitely Welcome Center?

[Koshari Mahana]

Hi Dot,

People react much better to images of front-facing faces than they do to scenery. An image of the Kitely Welcome Center just by itself would therefore have a negative effect on conversion from the homepage. A staged picture with interesting high quality avatars meeting/talking/doing something (in the KWC or elsewhere in Kitely that has no IP issues) could be better than our current image but that too would need to fit very specific requirements to work with our responsive design that needs to place (shrink and move) the text and button dynamically on computer, tablet and mobile phone displays. It would need to be very artsy (to meet veteran SL artists criteria) and taken with Ultra graphics settings at a very high resolution so it can be rescaled without losing sharpness.

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.

As for the Go to menu, the order isn't set in stone but it does fit the order that most new users navigate our site (at least initially). A/B testing this could result in changes but we're not set up to run multiple versions of our site concurrently and track different conversion rates based on how people interact with the different versions. It's something that we should do but, as always, we need to manage our priorities and there are higher priority items on our todo list.

[Dot Matrix]

What are the resolution requirements for the image? Aspect ratio etc...

Why not see if we could set something up at the regular Sunday meeting?

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?

[Koshari Mahana]

As source files we need 24bit (no transparency) PNG files in these resolutions:

desktop-homepage-image-1920x787: 1920x787
mobile-homepage-image-1x1: 1080x498
mobile-homepage-image-h-3x2: 1620x694
mobile-homepage-image-h-4x3: 1440x694
mobile-homepage-image-h-5x3: 1800x694
mobile-homepage-image-h-16x9: 1920x694
mobile-homepage-image-h-16x10: 1728x694
mobile-homepage-image-v-2x3: 768x694
mobile-homepage-image-v-3x4: 768x566
mobile-homepage-image-v-3x5: 768x822
mobile-homepage-image-v-9x16: 768x908
mobile-homepage-image-v-10x16: 768x770

For future use it would be best if we also got the desktop-homepage-image at double the resolution, i.e. 3840x1574 so we'd be able to create a higher resolution version of all the required sizes if needed. I didn't have that when resizing this image when we updated our site and I had to use AI resizing tools to keep it sharp then spend hours manually fixing artifacts.

The desktop image has to have a uniform (or slight gradient) color in the area our current 1920x787 image does to enable us to clearly overlay the text and button on top of it.

And that's just the technical part of it. Setting up a photoshot with just the right avatars at the right angles at the right location is also very time consuming. It's not something that I could set up. This requires a talented individual that knows how to create fancy looking images/art such as those that can be seen on the Second Life site.

As I said, it's a LOT of work so I wouldn't want people to take the time to create all these images if we end up not using what they submitted.

[Koshari Mahana]

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?

[Dot Matrix]

Thanks, Ilan.

Looking at the responsive design on a mobile phone, I see you use the standard hamburger icon top left for a drop-down menu, so why not put Forums after "Market" -- that way new people could ask their questions quickly and old hands would be able to get here without scrolling past lots of irrelevant pages (to them).

Or just put "Forums" at the top of that section, instead of 4th or 6th.

Or split that menu so that you have actual useful information in one group above all the legal requirements (Terms, Privacy etc) in another, so they don't get in the way of everyday stuff.

OR (better! ) make sure all the documentation (About, Terms, Privacy, FAQ, Documentation, relevant info from Blog posts) is accessible and properly organised in just one place so that it can be found by a single click to a clear list of contents, and have the Forums link immediately below the link to that contents page.

[Gusher Castaignede]

I CANNOT BELIEVE KITELY HAS A DISCORD CHANNEL, all 3d game related sites have one...

[Koshari Mahana]

I love this idea!

OR (better! ) make sure all the documentation (About, Terms, Privacy, FAQ, Documentation, relevant info from Blog posts) is accessible and properly organised in just one place so that it can be found by a single click to a clear list of contents, and have the Forums link immediately below the link to that contents page.