Good thin it isn’t geared toward you.

? So like… I’m a user, but I shouldn’t go there any more for my news & stuff. If I see 80k concurrency I might understand _why_ things are flaked atm. But K. Will go read secondlifeherald. Got the mshg.

I agree most of all with your last point. Horizonal scrolling is shite. Why would anyone want to put horizontal scrolling on anything? Boggles the mind.

And yup, they could have gotten some good looking SL photographs -WITHOUT POSTPROCESSING- instead.

It’s very looks iTunes like. Maybe it’s not for us current residents, but for all new someone who first time visiting secondlife.com.

BTW, I don’t like such flash heavy site too :-/

amazon.com uses flash you idiots. why does everyone in the second life community feel like they’re experts in everything (design, technology, marketing, business)

also, they’ve clearly stated that you’ll not see this if you’re a logged in user. get your sh*t straight.

LL has said that that front page in intended to be seen only by non-Residents (Residents who’ve logged onto the site at least once will have a cookie that takes them to a Resident-targetted page). I think that’s what the first comment was brusquely referring to.

But wow yeah, even (or especially) for non-Residents, those pictures are *awful*. I am disheartened that Big Spaceship (still rofling at the name) is clueless enough to either (1) think that these are good SL pictures, or (2) put up random pictures they happened to have lying around just as a test, not realizing that people would see it and think they were bad at choosing pictures.

There are *so many* clued people in SL! Why does LL always seem to pick the other kind to do stuff?

I think we should actually wait until we can drive this new set-up for ourselves before we delve too deeply into what is right / wrong with it (assuming the promised testing next week actually allows us to see it).

As it stands, this announcement from Katt is simply another piece of fluff from her (much like the announcement about the coming announcement about OpenSpace sims last month).

Until we can drive the “finished product” for ourselves, it is impossible to tell how it will function / look (are the images in the snapshot _really_ static, for example?).

That said, the broader aspects of this announcement do lend themselves to comment - particularly the fact that Flash is the tool of choice. That is is can only elicit one response: “Why?”

I work in publishing and the media. It’s fair to say that in both worlds, we’ve tended to find that Flash front-ends generate one of two responses from visitors:

a) Either they get hacked off waiting for everything to load and initiate (assuming they have the plugin installed) and go off elsewhere (thus Flash becomes an obstacle to drawing people in) or

b) Everyone navigates directly to the “Skip intro” link in the hope of getting to something more rational and more familiar to nagivate / use (thus the Flash content becomes little more than a maintenance-heavy waste of time).

Both of these reactions _do_ call into question Big Spaceship’s rationale, given their brief.

Are they perhaps looking more at a lucrative maintenance and support contract, rather than assisting LL in the stated goal of the “redesign”?

C’mon guys, SL holds the title of one of the worse websites around, they can’t just let people down now by doing a great site!! They have their reputation to maintain. ;-)

[…] and although I assume the new secondlife.com design will be crap until proven otherwise, they do deserve kuddo’s for Second Life’s Christmas splash […]

Did they farm out this assignment to their kids? Hopefully its just a rough first draft that escaped into the light of day. However I agree about the Christmas splash screens, I’ve been enjoying those. Occasionally something good slips though.

Simple:

‘orrible

Nuff said

Inara, we’ve waited. What do you think now? I have ‘full view’. Finally.

Ok, Romantic Connections: Second Life connects people from around the world using voice and text chat. if I click on ‘Flirt’. Geeh… and err.. also pixel perfect romance: discover romantic locations for dating, flirting, dancing and more.

“Where will you go?”
“Where will you go first?”
“Expect the unexpected?”

Well, shouldn’t you answer those questions, Lindens, in stead of posing them again? I’m sure people visit your website with exactly those in mind.

I dislike:

* no idea where you are in the ’scrolling’ wheel, as it’s looped endlessly, so the scroll bar below does not give any indication

* the ‘get started’ buttons all over (on each ‘pop up’)
* if you click by accident on the ‘membership is free’ one, you’re taken off the page directly.
* the ’sign up’ page could use a short summary list of reasons why people should sign up (exactly for those who get there click-by-accident)
* I get dizzy clicking things on the wheel after 1 minute, and total loose track of which one’s I’ve clicked and which ones I didn’t.

I like:
* the ‘where’s the party’ graphic
* ‘Play’ shows machinima. that’s pretty kewl?

Basically, I still stand behind my 3 remarks:

1. Flatness: ok, the thingies ‘pop-up’. And we have horizontal scroll. Yeey… still, no sence of ‘3D’ in it.
2. content: to be honest, I think the previous page gave gave more information without having to click anything. also ‘reasons to sign up’.
3. i hate scrolling: it’s obnoxious, especially horizontal, and it makes me dizzy + i loose track of where i was looking at

[…] wurde ja schon einiges reflektiert über die Neugestaltung der SL Webseite, beispielsweise von Vint Falken. Nun ist es soweit, schaut selbst. http://secondlife.com/ Spontan muss ich sagen, ist mir die Seite […]

Vint

I can’t comment, simply because I can’t get to see it. Even logged out and with cache cleared, I still get the “old” web page!

Is there an alternative URL?

Not as far as I know, sorry. You’ll just have to wait a bit longer. :(

(I’m starting to wonder what’s the use though, of switching it ‘user by user’/'country by country’/whatever … .)

OK.. I’ve now seen the new homepage, and my initial reactions are:

1. Uninspired.
2. Repetitive - all the images essentially say the same thing, over and over….”sign up”…nothing else of real value.
3. Flat.

My arguments against FLASH notwithstanding, there are many, many ways this could have been made very dynamic and could have got the message across loud and clear. While I’m not as bothered by some by the horizontal scrolling - and granted it breaks page layout conventions - IF the horizontal scrolling actually LEAD somewhere, gave further information, etc., then one MIGHT have justified it.

But it doesn’t. It’s simply “more of the same”. As you say Vint, given this, it is simply confusing.

Katt at al make big on the concept of “pods”. I say, “what ‘pods’?”. you scroll across a range of (somewhat insipid) images to be greeted by meaningless bylines and the daylgo SIGNUP message…

Again, with a small amount of vision / imagination, these “pods” could have been genuinely meaningful and given real insight into SL.

And for all it’s perceived (by LL and BS at least) “cleverness”, there is still no justification in what is being seen being handled via FLASH. In this regard, a lot of my initial reaction still stands.

BUT, as we know, the opportunity for us to comment is simply LL paying lip service to the community and our views. Katt’s comments make it all to clear that this IS the new non-resident homepage.

At least, as a registered user, I don’t have to look at it every time I call-up the SL website…that’s something to be thankful for….

i too disliked it, thought ‘oh big deal i’ll never have to deal with seeing it anyway’ since i am no new visitor..jump to going live.. now i HATE it - every time i visit the site it pops up and i have to log in before it’s back to the normal screen. i’m sure this happens to many people seeing that you should log out of your account after you visit anyway.
security vs. annoyance..hmm

maybe they’ll change their minds before deciding what’s best for us again..ui skins, homepage, i’m keeping tally

[…] new and not-really-improved […]