The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
New site! Club PA! Hooray!
calamityjamie
Corgi WranglerSeattle, WARegistered User staff
Corgi WranglerSeattle, WARegistered User staff
PA Web and Design (Kiko, Kenneth, Erika, and Levin) have been working incredibly hard to create this snazzy new site and our Club PA offerings.
http://www.penny-arcade.com
http://www.penny-arcade.com
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Yeah I took it to be a once-off payment for a six month period.
Why isn't Jamie's corgi avatar an animated paddling GIF?
Do the subscriptions auto renew or will I get the option to manually renew/cancel?
Oh thank you very much, I didn't even see that.
Are you going through the menu at the top to get to the comic?
Use the big feature carousel just under that. The PA comic has a big image on the left that takes you straight to dick joke central (now with 25% more dicks).
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I'll try for some constructive criticism"
The really thick bar across the top with the various images linking to PA comic, the trenches, etc. would be too much even if it weren't animated. But it is. Animated. Even if you don't mouse over it.
Do you want to click a link to read Trenches. You are in luck my friend. There's a link at the top. And then two inches below that link, is the comic drag down menu with another link to Trenches. Two inches below that is a gigantic animated picture linking to the trenches. Then at the bottom there's a link to the trenches main page, which has both the latest Trenches comic and story. And an inch below that is a link to the latest Trenches comic (which just takes you to the same page as the one above it). And an inch below that is an inch to the latest Trenches story (which just takes you to the same page as the link above it). I'm just using Trenches as an example, almost everything in PA is way overlinked on the main page. I realize Tycho and Gabe want to drive traffic to their other projects, but at some point it just so noisy that people will just ignore all the links.
Having to click through to read the news posts is annoying. I guess maybe this is to drive more ad revenue, but since the comic is already on a separate page from the newsposts, having to then click on each individual newsposts to read them seems to be a bit much.
Having the text of the newsposts just sit on the same page without a box to separate it from the rest of the page makes it rather hard to read. Especially since, at least on my browser, the right side of the text comes within an inch or two of the ads running down the right side of the page.
No fuss and/or muss.
http://www.goshawnphotography.com/cosplay
Dark, gritty, character centric portraits.
Giant Bomb's premium podcast RSS feed for subscribers works that way, I just have to enter my GB user/password into the app to check for updates.
And oh my god there's like 2 pages of footer, I can't even make sense of it.
It seems awfully tablet-y. Some of the UI elements and fonts are truly enormous on a real computer.
It overemphasizes non-PA comics. Links are fine, but they have their own URL's so it seems weird to have them on-par with the actual PA comic.
It is really long. In the widescreen era it seems odd to have content so vertically stacked.
I'm not a UI expert, and this post is suffering from negative selection bias; I like all the things about the site that are not mentioned. So there's my two cents.
It has an RSS feed but it doesn't, the RSS feed just leads to the general PA podcast RSS feed. I asked on twitter if they were gonna have a separate one for the staff podcast, or just a clubpa podcast feed but I am guessing Jamie is crazy busy right now responding to everybody else as is
Part of the reason it seems so tall is that there's huge amounts of vertical padding in #leaderboard (45px top+bottom = 90px), #main (55px top), and .navtop (38px top). Maybe there's a good reason for it? But it seems like a lot. Just trimming #leaderboard to 4px would get the whole comic on the screen on load for me. Granted my taskbar is on the side, so I have a little more vertical to work with than most.
edit: This is what the page looks like with the aforementioned padding set to 8px. Much more reasonable I think. (warning: large 1920x1080 image) 8px padding
That does help a bit.
Another thing bugging me a bit is that there's a lot of empty space besides the text on my monitor. It feels like some of the text on the main page could be moved to the left and widened so the page doesn't do a weird hourglass thing.
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I honestly cannot figure out if this is some kind of meta-joke or not.
Please?
they don't it be like it is but it do
I liked the old design for the same reason I liked that Tycho never allowed comments on the news posts: it gave me exactly what I wanted when I came to the page, without any bullshit. The new design is rife with bullshit, regardless of what I'm looking at. I'm well aware of the other PA projects, yes. That's why they're in my RSS feed. I do not need a massive banner.
Anyway, I expect there's no point in going on about it, as I don't believe that it's at all likely that there'll be any change from it. But I think it's at least worth saying that this redesign has made the site from something I genuinely enjoyed the look and layout of to something I am now forced to tolerate to get PA content.
I wouldn't be quite so pessimistic. The guys running the forums and site are actually pretty responsive to us lowly users. This is the very first version of the new layout, I expect it will be tweaked a lot over the next few weeks. When the Vanilla forums first came out they were a mess, but now it's quite nice (as long as you are using Ye Olde Style, anyway). I expect that, even if the site never becomes exactly what you are looking for, it will get better over time... eventually to the point where there will be nothing wrong with it that can't be fixed by writing a Stylish style.
I have to agree with this to some extent. On my 27" monitor I'd say it looks like space is being used rather inefficiently. It looks like I accidentally zoomed in on the page, everything is so big...but of course if I zoom out I just have smaller text and elements and even more wasted empty space.
@Aegeri - Yup! Club PA pins will ship everywhere.
@Raiden333 - That's Mike being a special snowflake.
@Raakam , @Humbugger - try setting penny-arcade.com/news as your homepage. It's less flashy and a lot more like the original site.
Also, on the front page of the new site, there's a dark blue bar that runs below the animated carousel. It's pretty tall, and pushes the beginning of the news post area below the fold, so to speak. Is it supposed to be that tall?
they don't it be like it is but it do