Kitely website needs a makeover

[Trouble Ahead]

I have been promoting our sailing sims in Kitely to many people in SL. They really love the idea of 16 sims or even bigger for sailing without any problems with sim crossings and crashing on them . I tell them as well we have good mesh avatars and we can provide people a good playground for the SPD sailing battle games without the lag they are used to have in SL .
First thing that happens when they open up the Kitely main website is the commend the avatars on them ( and the website in general ) is looking very old school. They ask me if there are good mesh avatars available and attires for them. Yes , the SL players are very much on looks it seems ! We all know , social media and X ( the formal platform known as Twitter ) is a good tool to promote Kitely, but when people watch the Kitely main website, it simply looks too outdated to people to catch their interest and take time to make a new avatar and explore worlds.
I really hope there are plans to update the website. And if I can , I would be happy to participate in a new make over.

Cheers

[Trouble Ahead]

Thank you for your feedback Trouble,

A few years ago we updated the website under the assumption that doing so would have some positive effect on the number of people who use our service. Unfortunately, despite modernizing it to fit the then current design fashion, it had no meaningful effect on signups or retention. Our experience has been that OpenSim users compare Kitely to other OpenSim grids, and our website was, and still is, more modern than the great majority of alterntives. Second Life users who are new to OpenSim, on the other hand, almost always come with expectations of finding the exact same thing as what SL offers but just cheaper. That's not a realistic expectation so most of those people don't tend to stick around on any OpenSim grid.

In other words, while having a more modern website may help convince some additional Second Life users to give us a try, it's very unlikely to help keep them around. The thing that does keep people around is having their friends active inworld on the same grid, in events or working on some joint project. Unfortunately, neither of those things depend on how modern or dated the website looks.

Regarding starter avatars, I recommend taking new Kitely users to: https://www.kitely.com/virtual-world/Il ... er-Avatars. It contains avatars that look better and are less dated than the ones our system automatically assigns people when they create a new Kitely account.

[Trouble Ahead]

So what you are saying, is that the majority of Kitely’s users are here for building purposes ( the great feature to have affordable land and many prims with good technical support) and less when its about building on “ social life “ as many do in SL. I see this also in my own behaviour and in other people’s: we built in Kitely and log in SL to join the bigger events and meet people we know for a long time ( but I was not able to convince them to move over to Kitely haha, well some come to see what we made and are impressed , but wont stay long bc they miss the traffic they are used to see in SL ).
As it comes on good scripters and animators ( we need them! ) people will stick to the places where good money will be paid for their services and sales.
Let us put it like this: only the happy few know where to get the freedom of affordable building and no landlords or lindens sticking their noses into our activities!

[Ilan Tochner]

Unfortunately, you're right Trouble. Most of the people who stick around are the builders, or people who have their own communities which they can bring over with them to Kitely.

[Gusher Castaignede]

Am a builder and stick around cuz I like it more than sketchfab....
Am hoping to see PBR from SL added here..

[Koshari Mahana]

I've said this before and I know we've talked about it a lot Ilan ... The biggest problem with the website is that the banner picture looks like the building style of SL in about 2008, it's out of style. I think a banner photo update using a more up-to-date avatar and scenery would do the trick and look more inviting.

[Ilan Tochner]

Hi Koshari,

Can suggest an alternative high resolution image from inside Kitely that is professionally created, fully licensed (both for use by us and for the content it includes in the build) and has the same location for displaying the text and button? One that has a different background and forward facing avatar that is more modern. We'll need to be able to crop the image for all the mobile aspect ratios we use as well. In other words, the automated positioning of the text and button and the requirements for supporting multiple clipped mobile versions that look good make this a more time-consuming task than you may think.

[Mike Lorrey]

I agree with Koshari on this 100%. We also need a page that is more user-centric that is a mix of the login-splash page features, along with offline IMs, a list so you can see who on your friends list is inworld, along with myworlds and user settings and store stuff all in one.
Also once again, a BBS forum is not just 1990s old, but 1989 old. We need to migrate to more of a social network layout, with interfaces between inworld groups and social network groups.

Also: Here is a suggestion to fix the problems with users screwing up other users events calendar listings: instead of having a kitely calendar that anyone can edit, enable people to share individual events they put on their own google calendar with the kitely calendar, or share speciic events with a kitely email that ports those events inworld to the splash page and the inworld events search.

[Koshari Mahana]

Yes, that would work, do you have a photographer in mind?

Hi Koshari,

Can suggest an alternative high resolution image from inside Kitely that is professionally created, fully licensed (both for use by us and for the content it includes in the build) and has the same location for displaying the text and button? One that has a different background and forward facing avatar that is more modern. We'll need to be able to crop the image for all the mobile aspect ratios we use as well. In other words, the automated positioning of the text and button and the requirements for supporting multiple clipped mobile versions that look good make this a more time-consuming task than you may think.

[Ilan Tochner]

I don't Koshari, the image we have now was taken by me of Dot Matrix in one of her worlds many years ago when she agreed to spend hours in a photoshoot. Unfortunately, as I hadn't captured it in high enough resolution and as it was taken as a JPG instead of a PNG I had to spend hours when we needed to upscale it for the current website. I had to use AI to upscale it and spent hours manually fixing compression artifacts and removing clouds from the sky to make room for where we display the text and button so it will have a good contrast. I then spent more time to create all the different cropped versions for all the mobile aspect ratios that we need.

I'm not going to do all that work again.