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Site Design Refresh

Site Design Refresh

The Game Crafter is pleased to announce our new site design refresh. We always want to keep the design of the site changing with trends, and the needs of our users. With that in mind, we’ve released the first part of our site-wide refresh for 2014. The changes may be subtle, but every single page in the site has been refined. Let’s enumerate a few of them for you:

The site has been brought inline with more modern design trends. Gone are the background textures and a lot of the shadowing, which has been replaced with a flatter, cleaner look. This is evident from everything from full page designs right down to the buttons.

The site has been made much more friendly to tablet users, such as iPad, GalaxyNote, and Windows Surface. The site already worked great for phone users, but we’ve made it an even better experience for you as well. No matter what size screen you have, we hope that you find the new design easier to use.

We’ve rearranged a lot of the navigation to make it easier to find things as a new user. It’s clearly working, because we’ve already witnessed discussions in the chat from long-time users noticing features that are new to them, but have been on the site for many months.

Probably the biggest and most noticeable change is that we’ve updated game shop ads around the site. We made these changes to make shopping on our site a faster, easier, and more pleasant experience.

The game’s shop ad image is displayed as normal at the top. However, now we’re putting the text version of the name below it. This is because some shop ads don’t clearly identify the name of the game. We also include a short description so that buyers can get a better sense of what the game is about before clicking in to the game’s page to learn more.

Instead of putting ribbons over the top of the shop ad image, we now color code highlighted ads and put the text of the reason for highlighting at the bottom of the ad. For example, the ad above (image attached to this post) is a staff pick. Not only do we display rating information, but also how many users have rated the game. This can give the shopper a better sense of if the game has a 5 star rating because 1 person said so, or 10.

We also include a buy button. It’s probably pretty rare that someone will buy a game without looking at the shop page, but often you do want to know the price of a game. If you’re on a budget and only have $20 to spend, then no reason to look at a $60 game.

Beyond the shop ads and the other improvements discussed above, there are hundreds of smaller refinements all through-out the site. I’m sure you’ll have fun discovering them on your own.
Enjoy!

Comments

I like what I've seen at

I like what I've seen at first glance, but the green "What is gamecrafter?" banner really doesn't fit with the rest of the design. The link colors and the fonts used in that don't fit with the rest of the design. I would recommend sticking to a single color scheme, either go with an all greenish color scheme (including the buy buttons) or switch to a bluish color scheme (and use that on the banner -- and perhaps later on the TGC logo)

I like the buy buttons and the cleaner approach, but you can bet I'll complain if upon closer inspection I find something I dislike.

Two greens?

I agree that the green ribbon as well as the buttons on the side seem a bit out of place colorwise. I don't know if it's just the way it's displayed on my screen or not, but the green in the logo in the footer and the chat stuff looks like a slightly different shade of green (less bright/harsh) and I like that color better I think - though it's hard to fully picture what it would look like using just that shade of green.

On the other parts of your site that I looked at, the green seems to take a back-seat and white and blue become more prominent. It might help the whole site feel more unified if it uses a single color scheme on every page with the same prominent colors.

That's very similar to what anonymousmagic said, but I wanted to re-affirm it from a person that is not very familiar with what your site looked like before.

All that said, I think the overall design look great. I'm working on building a website myself and haven't settled on a design yet, but some of the elements you used in your design have been showing up in my mock-ups.

Thanks for the feedback

Thanks for the feedback! I will pass it along to our dev team.

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blog | by Dr. Radut