Preview of New Guide Design

[weaselpie14]

Its simple, smooth and easy to navigate on (I normally use a small tablet for internet browsing so the layout is a dream come true.) :-) good job!

[IronicBeauty]

Absolutely love the new design! It certainly pulls off the fun Sim-ish feel with a professional layout.

As for my "two-cents": I find it hard not just to navigate my most frequented site (yes, this one... well, other than Netflix) but it also loads slow or freezes all together. This could be just my own PC with too much adware accumulation but I realize too that with all the ads that load simultaneously that it will crash the media and or the page altogether. Scrolling makes this very difficult as the screen must load over and over as I scroll down and freezes often. I know that ads are essential to support this Must Have site but the animated ads are doing a number on my puter. I apologize if this is just some lame technical issue that I'm just simply ignorant about, but I'm somewhat obsessed with checking and rechecking all the helpful guides which has become difficult for me lately.

Otherwise, I can't get enough of Carl's Sims 4 Guide!

[Carl]

Advertising will hopefully be somewhat less of an issue moving forward. There will be fewer of them, and one less in the sequence before page content loads. I was recently using the site on my tablet on bad hospital wifi and sympathized with what people with slower internet experience when visiting. This is going to have more that can be cached by the browser. If that continues once I relaunch, send me a PM @IronicBeauty and I'll see if i can improve it further. I am thinking an internet throttle on my home pc will help me diagnose these types of problems, because all this time I've had pretty quick net and it's hard for me to tell what user experience is like. There are too many calls for them on the current setup, and that's clear to me.

Yesterday I got Emotions and Skills into the navigation. Neither of these are finished, as there are formatting issues on both sections and neither are using the new image captions, but I'm learning to do this a little faster now that I'm getting more familiar with Jon's modern html. I am likely to go forward and leave things a tad sloppy so that I can be more efficient when I start beautification, shorten some titles, etc. My hope -- for now -- is that I can have this thing launched within 2 weeks, and maybe even by next weekend if things really come together! I've stopped all guide development and will not be bothering to edit things on the live site so that this process goes a little faster. I'll be editing career pages on the test site so that when the new design is rolled out, the paragraphs are correct. Also, the Collections section will be finished there so that I do not add more work for myself by adding pages during the transition.

 I can't wait to show ALL our visitors this new design. It's the clear winner in terms of user-friendliness and look. I am sure there are some folks who have come across my site in the past and seen the design, and not given the information a chance because of that. I'm eager to make that type of reaction a thing of the past. 

[IronicBeauty]

Advertising will hopefully be somewhat less of an issue moving forward. There will be fewer of them, and one less in the sequence before page content loads. I was recently using the site on my tablet on bad hospital wifi and sympathized with what people with slower internet experience when visiting. This is going to have more that can be cached by the browser. If that continues once I relaunch, send me a PM @IronicBeauty and I'll see if i can improve it further. I am thinking an internet throttle on my home pc will help me diagnose these types of problems, because all this time I've had pretty quick net and it's hard for me to tell what user experience is like. There are too many calls for them on the current setup, and that's clear to me.

Sounds perfect! Curious though, I run on a upper mid-grade gaming PC with high-speed cable internet but since I'm further from our cable connection I use my WiFi to connect to the network. I know that I would be faster with a direct connection so do you have what you would call business speed/connection? Can't wait till the new site is up. I will certainly test it often and let you know. 

[Carl]

@IronicBeauty I have the fastest available cable in my area (60 megabit), in order to have faster uploads. I pay for that just to get a small bump in upload speed to 5mb. I don't think many need speeds like that, but it's helpful for sending files to the server. I'm not quite using commercial internet though Other areas have much faster consumer internet, but downloading at 3.5MB/sec is pretty speedy for my town. I'll use some kind of rate limiter to test the new site once i have ads up. One issue with a lot of our pages is just the sheer number of images, along with those ad calls. I like to have higher quality pictures even though they take a bit longer to download. When a person revisits a page, they already have that picture cached so can avoid downloading it again. Another thing I may do while we make this transition is try to crunch the pictures just a tad without sacrificing quality. This will help mobile users in particular, where each pic may take up to one full second.

Thanks for the feedback on this. Not many bring up our ads and the speed, but I do know that it's been an issue at times.

[IronicBeauty]

@Carl I tested my speed with my service provider which gave me the results of; Download Speed: 17.3 Mbps (2.16 MB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 2.22 Mbps (0.28 MB/sec transfer rate) Latency: 19 ms Jitter: 3 ms

My son is directly connected and is about 3mb better in download speed. We pay for the max speed (residential) but I'm not sure what it is suppose to be. We have two separate cable connections on a decently large network for one family. With 5 computers and 2 PS's we've tried to minimize the lag but from the results I'm not sure we've accomplished that. Too, my husband informed me that I set my browser to clear all history whenever I close it which would slow down loading any page with animations or images that would otherwise be cached. Which probably explains the loading and reloading on title tabs on pages in the guide.

Sorry if I got this thread off topic, but I really depend on the guide and selfishly want it to run better for me. Of course, that would be better for everyone. 

[Jon]

@Carl I tested my speed with my service provider which gave me the results of; Download Speed: 17.3 Mbps (2.16 MB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 2.22 Mbps (0.28 MB/sec transfer rate) Latency: 19 ms Jitter: 3 ms

My son is directly connected and is about 3mb better in download speed. We pay for the max speed (residential) but I'm not sure what it is suppose to be. We have two separate cable connections on a decently large network for one family. With 5 computers and 2 PS's we've tried to minimize the lag but from the results I'm not sure we've accomplished that. Too, my husband informed me that I set my browser to clear all history whenever I close it which would slow down loading any page with animations or images that would otherwise be cached. Which probably explains the loading and reloading on title tabs on pages in the guide.

Sorry if I got this thread off topic, but I really depend on the guide and selfishly want it to run better for me. Of course, that would be better for everyone. 

When you describe a web page as 'laggy', do you mean literal framerate stutter or does it just take a while to load? From what you've said it sounds like there's a problem with your browser, not your PC or internet connection. Presumably you can run video games without an issue?

I'd recommend uninstalling your web browser and installing the latest version of either Firefox or Chrome.

[IronicBeauty]

When you describe a web page as 'laggy', do you mean literal framerate stutter or does it just take a while to load? From what you've said it sounds like there's a problem with your browser, not your PC or internet connection. Presumably you can run video games without an issue?

I'd recommend uninstalling your web browser and installing the latest version of either Firefox or Chrome.

I've used Firefox for years and refuse to use anything else (I believe Chrome was created by the Devil). My "lagging" is slow loading pages where it takes longer than I think it should for images and such to appear. What I was experiencing recently on the guide was total page freezes where I couldn't scroll at all or it would respond to my scrolling with up to a 30 second delay. Also, I do not experience these issues on other sites that I know of. I don't normally browes the web much either though. I frequent email, my utility sites to pay bills, my bank site, Netflix, and this site. I use to go to 'The Sims Resource' a lot when I played Sims 3, but their ads were redonklous. It put so much adware on my computer it had to be formatted.

I may need to run a cleaning software here soon as my heathen children sometimes sneak on and go to places like Facebook and such.

Oh, and yes, games run perfectly fine.

[Jon]

I've used Firefox for years and refuse to use anything else (I believe Chrome was created by the Devil). My "lagging" is slow loading pages where it takes longer than I think it should for images and such to appear. What I was experiencing recently on the guide was total page freezes where I couldn't scroll at all or it would respond to my scrolling with up to a 30 second delay. Also, I do not experience these issues on other sites that I know of. I don't normally browes the web much either though. I frequent email, my utility sites to pay bills, my bank site, Netflix, and this site. I use to go to 'The Sims Resource' a lot when I played Sims 3, but their ads were redonklous. It put so much adware on my computer it had to be formatted.

I may need to run a cleaning software here soon as my heathen children sometimes sneak on and go to places like Facebook and such.

Oh, and yes, games run perfectly fine.

Sorry I misunderstood your post. It sounds to me like what you're experiencing is a combination of throttled internet speed and latency between servers. You get good page load times on sites like netflix because they use things called CDNs (content delivery networks) which automatically pick the web server closest to you to ensure optimal loading speeds. Carl's server on the other hand may be located miles and miles away from you, which in conjunction with a network with multiple devices connected may result in slowly loading pages(/images).

The issue where the page was freezing is odd though. It could well be advertisements causing this problem- but I can't report anything similar and my laptop is not the hottest thing around town.

[Carl]

@Jon Those table-data insertions are done, and boy do they look wonderful! I checked for mistakes and didn't see any, so think I'm good to move forward. I'll have a lot more time to devote to the process tomorrow. I'm going to get more sections built so that I can give guide visitors the same preview - kind of hoping to let people who are frustrated with the current know that a better one is in the works!

You all can see how the tables on Careers look on mobile by resizing your browser window to the size of a smartphone or tablet. Each table collapses and has a square indicating what the data is ($/hour, job rank, etc.) so that a person viewing it in that situation can still understand the information. It's a wonderful addition to the site, but will take me some time to get all tables in collecting and other sections looking like that. Maybe in a week or so, I can ask folks to browse around and help me spot any I've missed, since it's a test server and all

As for the ad issue, I am going to be reducing the number of calls. That is likely an issue, because there is an auction of sorts to sell each ad space and if too many calls are made, it slows down the entire page display process. Anything in front of the data will be faster to allow pages to render more smoothly. Every item on the page is rendered in the order it comes in the code. With the new design, there will only be one ad in front of the actual data instead of two, and it will be a speedy one. This will make a big difference in load times by cutting the amount of calls to 60% of previous. It should bring you a noticeable difference in speed @IronicBeauty - but letting our site be cached would actually speed up your browsing immensely. Re-downloading the style sheet etc. each time will undoubtedly slow down the process. There are about 10 things that wouldn't need re-downloaded on your first visit, but I understand why some wipe cache when closing the browser.

[Carl]

As my understanding of how the design works gets better, I'm able to get work done more efficiently. Today I put up a 'Sims' section in the navigation that leads to traits, rewards, aspirations, etc. I didn't want it to get cluttered, so put these into one category. To prevent any confusion on where to find these pages, the Sims section will be the first one active. This should let people find pages like babies, how to move, and such without it being a headache. The goal here is to not really need search to find the page you need.

I believe I'm at 40/60+ pages converted. This is excellent, and is pushing me to try and get this completed as soon as humanly possible. The carousel on the home page needs links and another button, and I'll need to make a page about Expansions (for now that button leads to Get to Work) that will have all EPs/GPs listed in the order of release. People seemed to like the Expansion List for The Sims 3. However, I don't think installing them in any particular order is necessary so I'll separate them (list EPs then GPs).

When I have Collecting converted, along with all the individual aspiration guides, this will be nearly done. I'll then need to look at ads and beautify some pages.

Anyway, take a look guys and let me know how you think it's going

[Carl]

All pages up are now linked in the navigation and the carousel is working on the page. Clicking links within guides themselves may send you over to the live site, but any page should be findable by going to either the top or side navigation. For example, romance and woohoo are found under relationships as will marriage when that page is created in the future.

I am working out some issues with ads and then resuming the process of converting - we are just missing the individual aspirations and collecting, but possibly a couple miscellaneous articles now. It's almost better to visit the preview for the time being, given it's so fast with 0 real ads. I expect to be done by next weekend and get to launch the new design

[IronicBeauty]

It looks almost done! So excited!

[Carl]

I've found something that will help with ad issues for mobile in particular. We were going to have one loading whether people were able to see it or not (the one at left, which would then be made invisible by the mobile layout). I've found a way to turn that one off on mobile entirely, so that it will not consume resources, while there will be a smaller one below the navigation menu. Mobile users, when comparing this design to the previous, should see a 2-3x speed increase given they were forced to load all ads at desktop size. I'm glad you brought this topic up @IronicBeauty because it has me thinking of how I can do things better for everyone.

I'll be making major progress today. It is likely that the final pages will make it into the navigation and I can move on to adding a couple and beautifying before the whole thing goes live. I'll update this post with an edit line to indicate what I got done, but I'm feeling good about this!

[Carl]

I've just finished a lot of work on the conversion and think we're nearing the point I can make it live. I've still got some tables to convert for mobile, but every guide page is there (and should be found with little effort). Let me know if you have any suggestions for improving navigation. Certain things are grouped under the 'Sims' category that will later be under Misc or Tutorials, but we don't have enough of those yet to justify it. Thanks!


Oh and.. the Careers section is now edited. My intention is to go back one day and improve them with more details on interactions and the time one needs to spend on each daily task.