New Newsroom, Is flashy.

humonous

yeah, i totally agree with Kris, its wicked.

Dark Lord

i like it, but its too damn big.

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comp_ali

It is really nice to see guests can post also but I am worried it could be used for spamming.

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Cow_160483

I like it but the font is too big, just my personal opinion maybe i will get used to it

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Decode!
Muhahahahah!

Bolletje

Is it me, or is the FP somewhat brighter?

ET3D

Can you elaborate on this?

I always do. I check the news listing, the latest forum topics and the articles list. I do it quite a few times a day, and if I don't see anything new that's interesting, I go away.

I'm very interested in news, but I don't like sites where it's hard to get the news because there's too much of it on the news page, or it's unorganised.

I read most of my news over RSS feeds. DH is the only site I really go to. It doesn't have RSS, which is a main reason, but I also got to like it. I'm worried that the crowded main page will make it less fun for me to drop by, and I'll eventually stop visiting like happened with Bjorn3D. (Not that I'm planning to stop visiting for now).

That's it with the rant, now to more concrete comments.

I find the layout confusing. The news is laid out in columns, but timewise it's organised in rows. So it's not easy to follow the news by time.

Another problem I have with the columns is that each short new title is broken into 3 lines or so. I find it easier to read left to right rather than left-right-downleft-right-downleft-right.

I like the snappy one liner under the news. I also like that the news date and time appears.

I don't get the distinction between the new news panel and the old one. I keep trying to see if there's duplicate news between them. I find the old panel considerably easier to read.

Zardon

Elaborate on what? the size of the information on the front page is intentionally large as we never focused on news before apart from the forum. We want the focus to be on news, it sits under our reviews so its not getting the primary slot. All the other content is still there, its just shoved down lower. If you mean elaborate on staff payments, thats not really necessary in public - we pay most of our staff and many of the guys here make a full time living from working on the site. Some of them you don't see as they help work behind the scenes. These are the faceless heroes, but i don't mind taking the credit.

I think most people do, which is the point of changing the front page, the information was not updated often enough unless you looked at one line forum links - not a very good design ethic.

This makes absolutely no sense to me we spent time "uncrowding" the front page as people hated all the little tabs in the top positions which held no daily information, we had no news on the front page before anyway and im pretty sure most of our forum regulars read it in the news forums - which you can still do. however we have a dedicated news forum for our own generated news now which is actually making it easier for people to see our own news or worldwide linked news. Nothing has been changed apart from focus being given to it on the front page instead of basically 'dead' older review columns which have been pushed down the page.

This confuses me - it is left to right in a row system - we can't ultimately make every single news story identical in regards to word count and spacing so we have a system that was quite complex to code that adjusts itself to fit each little snippet into a specific area without forcing words to be cut off midway with "...." - this isn't something we just decided to roll out yesterday, we have been developing this behind the scenes for 3 months now. If every little news story wasnt identical in size then parts would be cut off to fix to specific pixel dimensions, this actually sounds fine in your head but it looks awful in practise as we did that initially and binned it. Sure they don't all line up 'perfectly' and the end text at the bottom isn't 'level' but its hardly making it hard to read. I am the most difficult person to please thats why this took so long to implement as we had 4 versions created which got canned due to legibility issues.

I honestly dont see how this is hard to follow - its even colour coded and has focus on the headers. I guess we can't please everyone however and I think most of the forum regulars will have a hard time accepting something new anyway, but we have a huge audience who actually don't post in the forums so this is for them - the forum sections are still here for the hardcore forum goers.

Spellbot5000

I like the concept, but it's WAY TOO BIG! Honestly, we don't need a large-print edition of Driver Heaven. Can't it be reduced to something like the "Other Tech News/Gaming News" box on the right side of the main page?

Any competent site with a lot of news or articles to present on the main page doesn't make one single area of content take up so much space. Look at all the other tech/games sites, or even mainstream news sites. Everything is streamlined and compact so you can fit a lot in without any one single item dominating the page.

Zardon

simple answer, as said earlier. no - the size is staying as is. I feel we are extremely competent incidentally but thanks for the concern.

clanman

Just as well im not running the show. guys with two posts bringing up 'competency'. banstick time.

The front page is great. the top part is still on reviews and the news is great and deserves focus. Clearly a few people dont use the same sites as me for news as ive seen some with the TOTAL front page given to news alone. I think people just bitch for the hell of it. I remember when the site changed design entirely, everyone complaining over the stupidiest of things, now everyone loves it.

The front page before this change was terrible, all those annoying panels for articles and older reviews, far too fiddly, now they are out of the way. hot news and news is all I need and its prime real estate.

BlueMak

The previous layout was, in comparison, awful. Here you can have an easy to read design with 20 news' items and the info that used to be available under the old design.

I don't get what the issue is with the size. In particular, what is supposed to be too big, nothing looks too big to me?

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comp_ali

The front page layout is far better than the previous one ,the font isn't bad all . the size and color are clear. I feel like the reviews index is updated as well , last times I saw it the numbers were constant and less categories , it is better now and thanks for the new search ability.

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Zardon

Good to hear, we are working on a brand new search index as well which makes it much easier to find things - thats a work in progress, as well as an IPHONE application and some other goodies.

Always busy behind the scenes to improve your experience !

SeraphicSorcerer

I love the new layout, but I still want to gripe about the position of latest forum topics, which is how I normally choose what forums to post into, because I don't like scrolling through forums.

I guess I feel like with the new news section being so good, the rest of the things around it feel like they could be spruced up much more.

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Zardon

What do you mean exactly? do you not use "new posts"options or am I missing the point?

Shaga

Looks nice! But first after reading couple news I spotted that there are no sources anymore. I really want to read the whole thing and original comments on the page where this "news" was posted originally.

Am I blind and missing something?

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Zardon

Yes, we are writing the news

http://www.hardwareheaven.com/news.php?newsid=199

Shaga

Oh that is most excellent! nice Z! Me likes.

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MIG-31

Just for youre info there is still some sourced news being posted.. Here

This is taking some time to get used too... And i like it..

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ET3D

Z, regarding elaborating some more, it just seemed that you said "we're paying people so we need to focus on this". This didn't make sense to me, since if that meant paying employees it would normally have been the other way round: we decided to focus on this, therefore we're paying people to do it. So I was wondering whether you meant something else.

It has all the same content and new content. How can that be less crowded?

True, but graphically it's in columns. At least for me, the columns suggest the expected direction of reading. It took me quite some time to realise that the actual order was a row system. That's why I said it's confusing.

The other news and the latest forum topics have also been pushed down. Looks to me like the latest topics have also been enlarged in font and there's maybe one or two fewer listed there (which IMO is a pity, though not a biggie).

I do agree with giving less attention to older reviews. IMO if you change the list to a textual one as it exists on the side of reviews, that would be better. Just a title and a "discuss" link. I sometimes want to comment on older reviews, and I found that going to a current review and using the list there is the easiest way. If the articles page had a list of recent reviews by date, instead of just categories, then I feel you could remove the old reviews from the front page altogether.

Zardon

No, we are expanding it and are proud of the system and team working on it behind the scenes therefore it deserves focus - its good content, its sourced many times a day and our readers will love it. I thought it was pretty obvious but hopefully that clears any confusion up.

Well this is based on your views that adding new content means its immediately "more crowded" even if is a new design - I guess you could say the same thing with the min fps graphs we added in reviews or almost everything we do on DH. The news content has been redesigned from the ground up to offer our readers more. The overwhelming consensus was that the older "articles/reviews" panels under "hot reviews" which were user toggable were taking up a lot of room for something that was not updated very often. Not everyone hated it, but a lot of people didn't like the fact it was taking up such prime screen real estate for very little 'daily content'.

This has been forced down the page and the news system added - unless you scroll down you don't see it. The news design is much easier to access and people don't have to click tabs.

Ok, well if you think its confusing there is very little I can say that will argue the point - even if you read it from top to down it isn't as if its suddenly breaking the usefulness of the content as they aren't linked into one big cohesive whole - every blue header has its own story - im quite sure if people see the text in the blue header and they read it before they won't accidentally click it again.

Regardless, I honestly fail to see how some news items which are updated to the top left of the box is hard to read or follow for anyone, especially as the headers are larger, colour coded and have time stamps. The higher you see the content in the panel the newer it is, really simple.

Yes 'other tech news' has been pushed down one row in the forum, we want the focus to be primary on the staff written content. I don't really follow the latest topics comment, as far as im aware nothing has changed in size on the forum.

Its an interesting point - on the reviews index there is a list of about 20 items which are listed by date from the top, however there is no page with a dedicated listing of every review from date created. We had assumed that the 'latest reviews' and 'latest articles' box on the indexes and on the forums would be enough as it covered several weeks of content. I will discuss this with Craig later - although we do have an upcoming search system being implemented in the near future.

isaak

apologies for wrong section probably, but this happens with me. the poll doesnt look in the right place to me i have tried refreshing the page several times but that hasn't changed it. Was only an error since the new newsroom.

I like the look of the new newsroom, makes news very clear and easy to read

craig5320

Thanks isaak which version of FireFox is that?

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ET3D

But it looks like the exact same design, with a new section crammed in the middle. Am I missing something?

I was referring to the main page, not the forum.

Actually, the problem was just that I didn't notice the panel on the right. 20 latest is probably okay.

Thought sorting by date isn't a bad idea. Looking for specific news that's out of the main page, I found that the sorting by last post made things a little harder. A sort by first post date would have been nice. It would also mean I could read the latest news on the forum instead of looking at the main page, which would be more convenient.

BTW, I found what looks like a small bug on the site's menu. Moving the mouse over an item that doesn't have a submenu shows the submenu of the last item visited that does have one.

Zardon

Well im quite positive you didn't think I meant the whole site was suddenly redesigned so I would assume you are trying to make a point in this thread. Lets just leave it that you think it sucks and let other people make comment.

isaak

the latest one, 3.5.5.

brutusmaximus

Well i saw this newsdesk yesterday and didn't follow through to this thread as I was too busy checking the front page during the day to see the comments.

I gotta say some of the regulars on this site really do need a little reality check. People who post here daily on the forums probably dont even look at the front page and I would make an educated guess that the reason for this was because there used to be very little on it. I am a forum regular and I hate reading news in a forum so I welcome this with open arms. Gives me more content which I like.

The comments about it being hard to follow or that someone said they were leaving due to it are very sad indeed. Same thing happened when the site changed design early last year and now everyone loves it. Amusing to read some of the comments in here, I would have though being such geeks in this community it would be really easy to adapt to new and well written news, clearly not the case

Works for me guys, thanks.

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Shaga

Row system works, haven't seen it being used too much.

Thanks for pointing out MIG-31.

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comp_ali

Thanks guys for the improvements in GH as well
http://www.gamingheaven.net/ I see every news is marked with PC/X360/PS3/general which is a nice touch indeed , I wonder if you can make it even better by enabling a filter to view each category news when you choose.

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dawgXdenta

Good work guys ,I just i saw it, looks good for random browsers: people who don't call DH home.
I approve

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