My two cents: The reason I liked Wowhead so much is the same reason I like Google so much; a clean front page without a bunch of cluttered pictures and flash objects. I know people always complain about change and such but I really feel (in my own opinion) that this is a terrible design choice. I especially miss having the search bar front and center; I mean, it is kind of the only reason I'm on the site and yet it is hidden up top. This re-design makes me a sad panda but no matter; I've already added Wowhead to my search engines in Chrome and can now search this site straight from my browser so I really won't have to deal with the new look much.
Nice clean and simplistic frontpage? Better make a mess out of it >_<There really isnt a good competition for wowhead so only protest I can do is enable adblock on the site.
The site looks pretty good and modern, but I think that:
Overall, the new design feels really generic, just more of the same "flat-color blocks with slightly-pastel accent colors" Metro-esque bandwagon that everyone and their brother is jumping on these days.And speaking as a visually impaired person, while you did make all the layout blocks bigger, you did so by increasing the padding, not by increasing the font size by any noticable amount. While I'm still zooming to 160% to have comfortably readable text on this page -- and 190% on search results! -- the whole thing feels far more gigantic than the old design, and I can see less stuff on the screen at a time now, which means more scrolling, which is never good.Some more specific complains:The lack of any kind of dividing line between rows in item listings (eg. search results, category browsing) and the low contrast between adjacent rows' background colors makes it hard to follow the rows across the (27" in my case) screen.The new ad banner at the top takes up a huge amount of vertical space, a problem compounded by the additional padding everywhere, especially at 160-190% zoom. Can't you put the banner back in the header section between the site logo and search box? And I don't really need a giant graphic advertising D3Head on every page -- it's bad enough that Hearthhead has a permanent entry in the main navbar. I don't play those games, and I'm not on Wowhead for those games.Not a new complaint at all, but dark blue text on a dark gray background is really hard to read. I'd guess even many people with normal vision would agree with this one. I know you're just using the same colors Blizzard forum posters use, and in-game rare items use, but couldn't you lighten it up a bit to improve readability? Purple (epic) text is also hard to read, but not quite as bad.Finally, the bright red buttons are... well... distracting and rather alarming. Red is pretty much universally used to indicate an error, so when I see a red block somewhere -- and the new buttons do just look like blocks, not particularly button-like -- my first assumption is that there's an error. :(
Well, my initial reaction is: "Whoa! Way too busy and where the heck is the search bar? Oh, there it is. And what the heck is up with the red buttons? Scream at me why don't ya?" (The big giant red buttons just seem to yell at me from the screen)I agree with some that the search bar was better off front and center. The front page just seems a bit too busy to me, but I guess that's the fad that's going these days. I do love the larger font, though... being one of the more "mature" gamers with older eyes, that happens to be one thing that makes me happy :D But that's about it so far. I'll know more once I play around some more. But I still think the front page is just a little too busy... maybe cut out a little bit, make it a happy medium? That's just my 2 cents. Thanks for listening.
Also, I just wanted to mention that the site and mainpage take an extremely to long time load on my phone due to all the clutter, which is unfortunate and ironic given the notion that you were trying to design a mobile-looking layout.Probably I will be viewing this site significantly less from my phone now, or else I will be canceling the page loads in progress once the relevant part of the page finishes loading.
No more artwork? :(
I'm not a man too fond of changes, but this I approve!Not only Wowhead looks sharper now, there's a touch of smooth elegance, all while being the favorite source of information for WoW.The people behind the new design sure done a good job.
It will take a bit getting used to, but I like it. Nice work Wowhead team. The most noticeable improvement are the fonts; size and readability have increased throughout the site, which makes for a better experience.Also, thank you for not changing the color scheme.
The new setup is great! Great job to all at WoWhead!
Seems to me like most of the negative posts are from long time users who only use Wowhead as a database. for example joined in 2008 with a post count of 2.While I use Wowhead mainly for the forum and don't use the database a great deal. the new front page and easily accessable news will bring more users to Wowhead because they will no longer have to go to other sites for those things, more users mean better chance to lure advertisers, which means more revenue to do even greater things with the site.Wowhead , no longer just the best WoW database but the best WoW site
Holy cow, this looks awesome! I love the new look!
Is there no way to fix the white screen that flashes between most parts of this site? The contrast between that and the dark theme is a pain in the eyeball.
White? It flashes black for me...
Nice, I like it.
I haven't had time to explore much, but I'm getting slightly queasy "page down" scrolling through this thread as the dark and lighter squares flash by. It seems to be similar to the flicker effect of driving along a forest road near sunset/sunrise. In short, not good and likely to make me not read the forum.I'm also having trouble visually tracking across columns in the forum. It's a lot harder to see at a glance which posts were commented on at what time.
So far I have been having trouble finding exactly what I want, but that could be the fact that it's different, not worse. I don't really know what I prefer.