Forum - View topicANN 5.0 Layout Options
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dtm42
Posts: 14084 Location: currently stalking my waifu |
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As has been said many, many, many times already, by numerous people, this isn't going to happen. The coding is completely different and all new articles require version 5 to work. Having different users on different versions is impossible. |
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Melicans
Posts: 621 Location: Canada |
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Perhaps the most telling problem with ANN 5.0 is that for so many users to find the site moderately usable they have to make multiple changes; to front page format, to character width, to skins, etc. As it is the default settings seem to be, by and large based on the majority of feedback I've read since the public launch, reviled.
Too much clutter. Too much white. Too much size. The default should be the most user-friendly option. A user/visitor shouldn't have to make so many changes just to make the website readable. |
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dtm42
Posts: 14084 Location: currently stalking my waifu |
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That is a fair criticism. Lemme see, to make the site readable I had to: 1): increase the text width to "200" to minimise the wasted side space and to make better use of my computer monitor's wide-screen. 2): change the skin to blue to eliminate the off-putting white 3): change the view from the default "Grid View with Images" to my preferred of "Text-only List View". I choose this option because grid view is cluttered, and without pictures I get faster load times and don't have to scroll down as far to view everything on the page. Three changes is a bit much, especially as each new user won't necessarily know how to change everything. |
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Melicans
Posts: 621 Location: Canada |
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And I just realized that at the current moment, if you close your browser window and visit again later, two of those three changes need to be repeated because the site apparently forgets them each time. I can't speak for everyone, but I tend to close my browsers frequently; pretty much everytime I make a purchase, do internet banking, run Spybot immunization, update various programs, and of course restarts for automatic updates or the rare freezing of my desktop. If those are fixable bugs then it is fine, but if it is not that is more changes than I desire having to make just to read the site. |
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Ashen Phoenix
 Posts: 2912 |
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I'll be the first to admit, when I laid eyes on the new ANN it felt pretty scary and jarring, but knowing there are stupidly easy ways I can change the look and layout of the siteto better suit me personally--as often as I like--made this a whole lot easier.
Thanks to everyone involved with ANN. It has been my number one go-to for all things anime for the past five years or more, and it means a great deal. Please keep up the incredible work. 
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Loren Leah
Posts: 45 Location: USA |
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I don't mind the new layout now that I've been informed of how to customize it, but I think it could have been announced and explained much better. I visit the site daily for news and I never saw a thing about this until I was reading an article one day and suddenly, poof, new layout. It seems that if there was an announcement it didn't hit the main RSS feed.
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ikillchicken
 Posts: 7272 Location: Vancouver |
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I really think the situation would be radically improved if ANN just made text width 200 by default. I'd prefer the default change for issue #3 too but if you have to it is easy enough to change yourself. There's a button right on the homepage. And I don't find #2 to be an issue myself. The white really only looks excessive when the text width is at 100 in my opinion. |
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bakaShin
Posts: 102 |
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I'm on the camp of pre-ANN5. I handle change well but ever since Facebook went to the tile/block format everyone including ANN seems to have the need to follow it. This may work for reading manga and comics but for websites you read information up to down like a list. Putting articles in blocks and tiles of uneven sizes only add to the confusion.
No use in bitching now as what's done is done. You will have to eventually accept it sooner or later. |
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Kikaioh
 Posts: 1205 Location: Antarctica |
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My guess is that they're hesitant to default to 200 because smaller monitor resolutions would cut off the side of the page. But it seems strange, they mentioned that 5.0 uses a responsive design, so you'd think that all the divs and text would naturally resize by percentages/auto-load different CSS files to fit well in different resolutions. I wonder what the reason is for having to set a specific character length. |
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animemaster1
 Posts: 105 Location: Beverly Hills |
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Well, I for one, hate the new layout, just like I hated how they changed IGN's layout. I don't like how websites are changing to this style. Big pictures all over a webpage doesn't make it easier to browse, but rather more difficult since it makes everything so chaotic, regardless of whether anime may be a visual medium, as stated in the article. I read that and said to myself how dumb that sounds to use that as a reason for wanting to change the format of the website. I also simply don't get the appeal of it either. Why would someone want it this way. People tend to know how to read words in their native language you know, and as such should be able to find what they are looking for just fine. It makes me laugh when I think about it because it reminds of a McDonald's cash register: you have the images instead of words because the people working there are so dumb that they need to see the picture of what someone is ordering to understand. But unlike McDonald's, there isn't a need to dumb things down on a website. We, the audience, aren't stupid (I guess I can only speak for myself though) and the staff, I assume (or possibly assumed now) aren't either. So simply put, this change makes no sense to me and I can't find the logic in it. But whatever, I guess I have to deal. At least I can make it relatively closer to how it was by using those green icons.
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Polycell
 Posts: 4623 |
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Dessa
 Posts: 4438 |
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I only had to make 2 yesterday (layout and text width stayed, skin didn't). Imagine my surprise this morning, when all 3 stayed after closing my browser!! Except, it also still shows things that weren't posted in since yesterday having new posts, and takes me to the first new post when I visited yesterday, instead of today. It might be a Firefox problem (my app tabs also disappeared), I'm not sure, I'm going to check when I'm done reading posts. [edit] Nope, it was a Firefox problem. Had to reset the laptop, and now everything's back to layout + text stayed, skin didn't. |
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Tempest
 I Run this place.ANN Publisher  Posts: 10424 Location: Do not message me for support. |
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Yeah, I was very unhappy that we had to do that, but it was a decision we made in order to make those menu's usable on touch devices. On my ipad, when I wanted to access a submenu, it was completely impossible. For example, if I wanted to go to the press-release page, I'd touch news, and that would take me immediately to the news section. There was no way to ever select an item from the news menu. So that is, admittedly, one place we sacrificed traditional desktop usability (ie: mouse), for touch usability. As I mentioned elsewhere it was important for us to design one site that would work on all devices. Not design a site for desktops, a site for netbooks, a site for tablets, and a site for smart phones.
I agree. There's no current plan to put that onto the front page, but it is something I want, so hopefully it will be there in a future update. The next update (5.1) is to the sidebar, and that will auto-update with articles without needing to be refreshed.
I've looked into Azure and Amazon EC2. Spent more time looking at EC2, and I'd love to be on either of those services. But it would increase ANN's hosting cost significantly. What we currently spend on hosting is private, but moving to EC2 would literally cost us several hundred thousand dollars more a year. -t |
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thecritter
Posts: 68 Location: Northwest GA |
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I think what puts me off the most on this new layout is the excessive use of emphasis for article's title. It's a known principle of online and print publishing that emphasis can be overused. In the article titles, you have upsizing, bold, and change of color for all. It makes the titles harder to read. A single level, two at the most, is fine for article titles. Adding the third reduces ease of reading. I'd suggest a 1 or 2 point upsize (no more) and color change, leaving the bold off. Triple emphasis should only be used for the most important parts of the page.
Another publishing principle comes from newspapers. Capitalizing every word except the most minor ones works in book or film titles, but it's distracting and makes the reader have to work harder. Spica Leath's Film Oddboy is US Box Office Champion for Ninety-Seventy Week in a Row is a little harder to read than Spika Leath's film Oddboy is US box office champion for 97th week in a row It may seem like a useless distinction, but it makes a big difference when scanning a page for items of interest. Every little touch that makes reading easier should be a priority. It's too easy to lose interest in a cluttered, over-white-spaced, overemphasis-as-a-matter-of-course page. I know the "modern" look has been the rage for the last year or so, but homogenization of website appearance is not a good thing. The individuality of sites is disappearing, and there's so often nothing to recommend one site over another other than content. Certainly ANN's the only thing of its type out there, but look at what homogenization has done to manga sites; many of them now look as if they were stamped from the same cookie cutter, and most of the new site looks share the same sins. ANN should not become part of the trend. I appreciate the fact that Da Boss is reading these comments and replying in a measured way. That's a huge improvement over the arrogant attitudes of designers and owners of other sites (like the jackasses at BakaBT, for example). |
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Mohawk52
 Posts: 8202 Location: England, UK |
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