User talk:DC Malleus

Front page redesign

I feel like the material unique to the wiki (character attributes, items, strategy guides) should be placed at or near the top of the page. Those are the things that most people are going to be looking for, so they should be front and center. Most visitors should already be up-to-date on stuff like servers and recent Crawl news.--Skrybe (talk) 23:50, 3 December 2014 (CET)

Hey Skrybe! I checked out a bunch of other wikis and mocked up a few designs last week, all the while thinking about the types of people who would actually be hitting the front page. My (completely unverified) hypothesis is that you'd get roughly four types of people: The Curious, Neophytes, Journeymen & Masters. Anyone who's not just curious is going to have a rough idea of how the wiki hangs together, and will hopefully be able to use the home page as more of a digest than an index. The main aim with this version of the page is to to entice the Curious to dig deeper :) I expanded the game summary so people don't have to go somewhere else to get a handle on the very basics, and thought it would be better to get them straight into the game first before working out what they need to start searching the wiki for in earnest. I think it's great that we're talking about this and would love to get some data (or at least more opinions!) to validate/invalidate the changes being made. DC Malleus (talk) 00:58, 4 December 2014 (CET)

Hi! Oops, I made the change without realizing the discussion had begun! The reason I gave in my edit summary seems to match Skrybe's assertion perfectly, and I hadn't even read it. I check the wiki often while playing, and while I have always had to scroll a little bit to get to the navigation links, now I suddenly had to scroll a lot! I hope you don't mind that I changed it back. I think most people use it to look stuff up, and the closer to the top they are, the better and more useful it becomes. (IMO) Edit: this is especially true when the action is routine and repetitive, such as mine are for constant consultations on spell books, gods, decks, etc. The front page is perfect access for all these things, but just because it's all right there. Maybe move contents their own page, then? But I thought a front page was supposed to be for quick navigation. Hmmm. --Aule (talk) 07:36, 4 December 2014 (CET)

I'm honestly a little surprised that people actually use the front page navigation links :P I'd assumed most people just type the item in question into the Search bar and go from there, but hey, you have demonstrated otherwise. I personally have no real preference as to the layout of the front page, but I'm glad to see people playing around with it. Thanks for expanding the list of servers, by the way (whoever that was...)! --MoogleDan (talk) 14:25, 4 December 2014 (CET)

Yeah, I open two tabs when I play: the CAO Crawl server, and the CrawlWiki main page. During a game, I'll switch over (sometimes often), scroll a bit, click once and look at what I want to find, then click the back button on my mouse to return. Much more efficient than typing in the search every time or saving multiple links. When I first started coming here, the links were almost at the top, which was very convenient.--Aule (talk) 16:12, 4 December 2014 (CET)