I personally don't see any issue with the new front page look. As for the font thing people are complaining about... well truth be told, not everyone is going to like everything about a site, that doesn't mean they will stop using it. Regardless of what the developers ultimately choose, 99.9% of the users will continue to use the site simply because of how much of an asset the site is. That being said I do agree that you could have better space management on your other pages and the blue icons against the grey menu bar is just fine. For the love of all that is holy, don't use a white background. Take it from someone who has done HTML white is a bad bad choice. In fact I like the tool bar WoWhead currently uses. Simple. Clean. Efficient. Other than that nice job on the layout and please keep up the awesome work WoWhead does!
The new design would be awesome!I too miss these news articles and posts. Would it be possible to add a widget to the site design that would scroll through the most recent screenshots that have been added as well to get some of those some extra visibility?
Jokerman font or gtfo! :P
Whatever you are doing, keep it up! my WoW gaming experience over the years was smooth thanks to you :)
Looks the same to me. :(But keep up the good work. :)
The design is nice, but the new typeface is not so great. It's rather staid and not something I'd associate with a Warcraft database. Why are the ascenders so narrow? I think you're going for a more refined look but the site is white on black/gray, which is not very reader friendly as it is. The type looks even less readable with such a fine typeface. What's wrong with keeping Arial or using something equally easy to read?
gets my vote, look forward to the new look.
I'm okay with this. Still looks smooth...
Be careful with how much information you put on the home page. I always appreciated how little information was on the homescreen because it reminded me of Google, which is a search engine you can draw inspiration from. It's not that your homepage was barren, it always had a few relevant guides or posts right on the front page. Too much information can draw attention away from the important aspects of the homepage (namely, the search bar).
Go for it! :-) The font looks a bit off in my eyes, but I am certain that two days after the change I would not be able to remember how it looked before... One thing about fonts, though: don't change just for change's sake. If you switch to another font, do it because you want to say something with it. It might not affect whether or not your members go to the site and use it's features, but it will affect their attitude towards what you write here. The good part with Arial is that in many eyes looks rather serious. If you replace it, replace it with something that also comes with those connotations. In other words, do the same good and solid research you do with the content on the site! :-)The layout changes I applaud! On my 'droid it's often hard to find the news...
I don't like the new font. The current one is easier to read & looks better.
I think my post history echoes this, but it looks like the Hot Addons section is gone, which is good. Gearscore is a relic of a past expansion. Better to focus more on the Blue and Tweet Tracker. The tags thing is kind of ehhhhh too.The Wowhead forums will lose emphasis, but they've been really slow for a good while now. Even the WoW class boards can be kind of slow these days. Always felt like it could have used an update of some sort, but maybe not worth it at this point, and I've always liked the simple look. I suppose if you really wanted to, you could put Forums and the IRC on the top bar instead of nested under Community to see if that helps. Take those out and everything that remains is mostly site-specific stuff instead of Community. I've always been a big IRC and Forum guy, so consider me biased a bit. =pLooks good.
9/10 times I come to Wowhead it's to use the item database. If I want news I click on News or go to my RSS reader (which apparently stopped getting Wowhead updates a while back, how odd *fixes that*). The new redesign won't chase me away, the item database is entirely too useful, but it will make a lot less enjoyable and more distracting.Don't particularly care one way or another about the font or the overall layout tweaks on their own though. :-P Just don't clutter up the main page so much (and besides, where would you guys stuff full page splash adds that occasionally result in me misclicking and going "Augh!" as I accidentally redirect myself? haha). Could bump up the size of the news blurb below the search box though I expect, maybe throw in some headlined pictures there instead of a handful of text-only headlines with one or two tiny images? Tiny screens would have to scroll to see them all, but the main search function would still be front and center. I'unno.Nth-ing that the blue buttons feel out of place, they're too bright against the charcoal background. Darker and/or less saturated blue might work though, color's not bad just jarring in this case.*****Is Wowhead an item database website that has news, or are you a news website that happens to have an item database wedged up in one corner? :-)
I happen to like the font. and the size. I'm eager to see it live.
I'm with the people saying the focus of the frontpage should be the searchbar - the database is what Wowhead is about, and while the news is indeed good, it's not what made Wowhead what it is. There are other news sites, but the only other active database (that I'm aware of) has nothing like the strength of this one, and it really should remain the focus of the site, with the news as a secondary thing - don't make it "just another news site" with the database forgotten in the background, please.I love the current frontpage layout, clean, simple, and, as someone else mentioned, rather Google-esque, it works beautifully. I agree that it's a good thing to put more news on the frontpage (I tend to miss contests and the like as I don't check the news page that often - like I say, the database is the important bit!), but please, leave the searchbar in a prominent, central place with a nice space around it, don't just tuck it away in the top corner like on the rest of the site.
Looks GREAT! I also think the font looks awesum - Keep it up <3