Please let us know your thoughts about the new website design. Specifically, let us know of bugs that you come across, and places where we can improve on the functionality of the site.
Of course, it’s always nice to hear compliments, but suggestions, questions, and/or complaints are often more informative and valuable to the design process.
A new feature that would be cool to see down the line would be a way to search the art assets gallery. I know the google search button has been added (in addition to the forum search) but I couldn’t find a way to search the Art Assets in the Downloads section. Yes, I realize there are only 3 pages right now, but that probably will change, and a search will become key.
The site looks really great. Here are a few things:
In the new forum interface, the “View posts since last visit” link has been removed. This was the most useful link on the entire website! I’m lost without it!
The site has a fixed width which appears to be 981 pixels. This is wider than I usually keep my browser window, so I have to scroll over to see content on the right. Almost all sites keep their content within 800 pixels wide, or preferably have variable width content.
On the bugzilla page, mousing over the “About Panda3D” menu causes the main content to disappear. Mousing over the other menus does not cause this problem, and this also doesn’t happen on other pages. This is with Opera 7.51 on Windows XP.
The “Log in” link is always a “Log in” link. In the old interface, this would be “Log out [ username ]”, if I was logged in, so I could tell that I was logged in, and had the option to manually log out, if, for instance, I was using someone else’s machine.
There’s no link to see if I have private messages or to view them if I did.
This isn’t a big deal, but all of the pages seem to be extremely long, with a bunch of blank content after the main content, but before the footer.
Here’s another problem that I noticed while getting a topic reply notification regarding this post. The Forum is embedded in an iframe, which makes it difficult for people to communicate the url of a post. They have to know that the subject line of the topic is a link to the thread, instead of just copying from the address bar. Then, when they mail that url to someone and the someone checks out the link, they come to a bare page of the thread, without much to help them navigate back to the main Forum or Panda site.
Looks like most of the problems pertain to the use of IFRAME tags to encapsulate the forums. I’ve coded up a completely different way of incorporating phpbb into the website. Let me know if the new method works better. If it does, I’ll do the same with bugzilla.
The website looks nice.
One small thing I noticed is that in the gallery page when you select the Kotodama pictures there is a link that looks like it should link to the project page but instead just links back to the picture page you are currently viewing.
The Kotodama website is: http://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/jlls/kotodama/
