Website Navigation

[PClark]

I am quite new to PS, and my first problem I found was the difficulty it is to find certain things. ie. this forum

www.planeshift3d.com redirects to www.planeshift.it.

And then that really nice, but very annoying introduction. It\'s not very smart to have a flash introduction to a website. It would be smarter to integrate the intro into the actual homepage.

It would be good to stick to a common URL for the planeshift homepage. Everything is so spread out it\'s hard to find things, and navigate.

Another thing that I found difficult was the avaliabilty of the forums. It\'s not really the navigation from the homepage, but rather the actual forum URL. It would seem more convienent to make it a subdomain.

[acraig]

The forums and the main site are actually 2 very different sites.   planeshift.it is luca\'s own site that he pays for.  These forums are on a machine donated by the good people at oodlz.com.  So we cannot merge them two as well as we may like.

[Karyuu]

Forum URL is easy to memorize: planeshift3d.com/wbboard

OR

planeshift.oodlz.com/wbboard

The website is simply planeshift.it :) Not too difficult. A lot of websites have a splash image/animation in the beginning, and it\'s really easy to skip it. Or you can just type in planeshift.it/main_01.html, also not too hard. I don\'t think anything is too difficult to navigate through, really. Maybe you have to spend an extra second here and an extra second there, but there\'s no huge rush... :)

[Cha0s]

Karyuu, I think what he is referring to is that some people (not necessarily him) don\'t like that extra work. They want it all to be nice and intuitive. I myself would like a direct link to the forums from the main page (not one that\'s hidden in a picture >_< ). Also, Talad could probably set up his site with a sub-domain that loads up oodlz so that it seems like the forum URL is forum.planeshift.it. I don\'t think these things are necessarily priorities, but it would be nice to see them done at some point.

[Karyuu]

If someone frequents the forums... frequently, it\'s not that hard to make a browser bookmark, too :P Or be like me, and make far too many:



;)

I don\'t know, I personally am comfortable with the way things are but I suppose they could be different.

[Cha0s]

I make tons of bookmarks too (I actually have more ), but for new users, it\'s nice to see a big link right to a place where they can get help (that link should inform you to search before posting, though, of course ).

[PClark]

Well, I\'m glad I didn\'t get chewed out..But, about the fact there are two differents site, although odd.There needs to be an offical one...There is no way to merge the two? And yes it would be great to have a forum link on the main page, rather than hidden in \"community\".

About bookmarks. I do use bookmarks for forums...but if you just browsing in the library or such, it\'s nice to have a URL thats simple.

You have a great URL planeshift3d.com, that is simply a redirect. It seems almost wasteful to have such a top domain, used as a redirect. Why not have planeshift.it be the main site, and simply have planeshift3d.com be forums or the \"community\" site.

The community site that navigates registering, forums, fan art....

Planeshift.it could be releases, planeshift news.

If you want planeshift to remain and expand professionally it might take some reorganization.

Another comment on the forum....

I do infact prefer the color scheme in the Linux forum. It has a more fantasy feel, and it fits along with the planeshift.it site, but it\'s very weird and unprofesional to have two different color schemes in a forum.

Is there any reason why registration website is:
http://laanx.fragnetics.com/register/

Now we have three websites that are based on one game.

[Cha0s]

laanx.fragnetics.com is the address of the Planeshift server. It also handles character registration and server stats/server-specific news.

As for the color scheme thing in the Linux forums, that\'s an error that never got fixed (though it should be fixed ).

If you like that color scheme (called \"Planeshift-test\" ), you can change your default color scheme in Profile->Options.

[acraig]

Right now we have 3 main sites for various reasons:
1) http://www.planeshift.it  This is Luca\'s website and the one he pays for.  It is
                                 used for basic hosting of the website.  

2) laanx.fragnetics.com This is the \'game\' server and handles the game  
                                      engine, database.  This is donated by
                                      fragnetics.com

3) planeshift.oodlz.com This is the \'community\' section and hosts the forums
                                      and bugtracker sites.  This is donated by oodlz.com.


We could probably improve a bit on the look and feel to make them seem like more the same site.   Since we are working on donated services it makes it a bit more difficult to unify them.

[lucifeir]

Its really not that hard to get used to the web site
imm new too but i took 2 whole days to navigate the site and get used to it , now i know where every thing ios

[Cha0s]

Well, ideally, the site should take about 10 minutes for a person to understand the overall layout. It should take about 5 seconds to get to the forums for the first time.