To clear up a few misconceptions...the cinematics playing are not for entertainment, they're part of an ad unit. As video ads monetize better than static images, this unit is one of Wowhead's most successful ways to monetize. We have a contract with a video ad provider that serves video ads interspersed with the cinematics, and they request WoW-themed videos to buffer the ads. We decided upon a static playlist, as we had problems in the past where the ad providers took random videos and displayed PTR spoilers, but things are getting stale, we may add some more videos from Patch 8.1 and 8.2 to mix it up. Previously, we have lost targeted ad deals because we did not have this sort of video unit--for example, the Warcraft movie was interested in a video ad unit playing their trailer, and we didn't have that capability a few years ago.You'll notice similar cinematics/video units playing on other WoW websites that also have high desktop traffic and require developer resources. Maintaining specialized tools beyond general guides such as the database, datamining, and translated subdomains takes additional resources and costs, most/all of which would not be feasible if we turned off a major source of monetization. There's a general trend among gaming sites to cover a few guides across a variety of games, moving from new release to new release and abandoning old guides, as that's more cost-effective that dedicating an entire site to one game/company--sites like Wowhead are dying out. So we need to do what we can to be sustainable while maintaining our commitment to high-quality WoW/Blizzard information.More on our ad policy can be found on our Ad FAQ.We also appreciate all the feedback on the actual navigation redesign and hopefully we will have more to share soon on other design improvements to other parts of the front page. We're currently looking at some mockups to make the featured guide section and Today in WoW tidier.
As for the ad debate:
I like using my favorites for this site for frequently used guides and such, is that the star next to the user name I assume?
I prefer the current compact version of the header honestly
It's better. But I still wonder why settings (such as if you want to see Classic or not) need to always be a visible checkbox. For me, that is something I would go to a settings page to adjust and prefer it wasn't always in my face for an accidental click.And lets get rid of monster bars at the top on content we aren't following. I have Classic turned off and still had this 2 inch block of classic guides - which I obviously don't care about.
Is there an option to filter the front page news? Or will there be in the redesign? You guys do a fantastic job, but I just couldn't care less about Vanilla WoW. I've been there, done that -- and would rather not see any headlines related to it when sorting for WoW retail news.
Looks great to me; I'll probably be used to it within a week.
If ads bother you.... why not get adblocker? It's free.
From the pictures you've provided it looks good. Looking forward to the revamp and I hope there are no bugs.
I like the redesigned header. Much cleaner.As a user, I have found many issues with this site over the years. I end up spending combined hours using a CSS/JS injector to override many aspects of the site for usability and to correct bugs. Unfortunately, being just a user, this means I have no control over making these changes natively so all users can benefit. I have a strong feeling the redesign will introduce more issues while correcting a few existing. The site has never felt optimised. This is one reason I never use mobile. It's just unnecessarily slow and nearly useless.Do you all not have a UX research team? You make changes. Subsequent forum and comment flood. Then you make more changes slowly, or not at all. As much traffic as this site gets, you should have a very large set of users that can access the development/beta to test for you. Many websites have this program in place to get feedback well in advance.Unfortunately, like many users here, I feel my comment will go unnoticed or ignored. Mostly due to perception. It appears nothing gets done.
it still feels very weird to me that the bits of the site I find most important and that I use most often (the database) are the things that are hardest to navigate to, both because they're downplayed in favour of... I guess class guides? and also because having two rows of dropdown menus means that a lot of the time, when I try to navigate the Database menu, I accidentally pull up the Season 3 menu instead.This is a problem both with the live layout and the revamped preview, but it seemed a good time to mention it. Looking forward to the news revamp; there are several pages that are just completely blank with no news at all because I have non-live news hidden (but I greatly appreciate that those filters even exist at all now, so thank you for that!)