As many of you will notice, I have spent some time recently tweaking the website to try and improve its usefulness, while others work on long term solutions. The main changes people will have noticed are updated CSS styling, and reworking the links in the navbar.
Most of the work I have done has been based on tools provided by Google Analytics which can show us how people really use the site, and how to make things easier for them. I have been moving the links that people use most to the top, moving less used links lower down, and removing links that are obsolete or hardly used at all.
Google Analytics shows that the most popular link is to the screenshots page, so I thought this deserved extra effort. I took a look at the distribution of clicks on the various screenshots and made the following changes:
Firstly I moved all the images which are not true client screenshots onto another gallery page. Artwork examples, and prototype code are good to have on display, but should not be represented as normal client screenshots.
Secondly I archived a number of very old or very boring screenshots into a backup folder, which is not currently displayed.
Thirdly I took a look at the popularity of what was left, and discovered the following things. The images at the top are most popular. Not very useful information, but it reinforces the importance of making the ones we have there some of the best. Images that feature character artwork attract more clicks than those that don’t. It seems people are more interested in the parts of the game that involve characters interacting. This is not surprising, but good to have confirmed. Prettyness seems to be the next most important factor.
In summary, please only post genuine client screenshots to the main gallery, and remember to include good views of more than one character in them if possible. Making them as well framed and pretty as possible is also a factor in whether people will look at them.
Any other thoughts on how to improve the gallery, or the website as a whole welcome.
Looks much better. Wierd rollover effects for the titles on the screen shot page. The stylesheet wants to auto scroll horizontal and verticle.
Though couldn’t find the google screenshot
good to see things are still rollin’ along ;-)