Preview of New Guide Design

[Carl]

While Jon is working on design a bit more to iron out some kinks, I got things organized a bit better and ensured all sections of the guide can be reached. I invite you all to visit the test site for your guide needs at the moment due to the performance. It's much faster to use because of lack of ads and the ease of navigating it When we are done with this testing phase, I'll come up with a new password for the test site so that I can use it to try out changes before they go live without anyone seeing my mistakes 

Any suggestions to improve navigation or organization are welcome. When you visit a section, you should see pages related to that on the right. I've done this for pages that are not easy to categorize - for instance if someone is visiting cheats, they'll also find tips and popular help articles.  The 'Game Help' section will contain all articles not directly related to Sims themselves, and we'll certainly have more of those as time goes on (parties and more tutorials for sure). I've certainly not kept up with the game as much as I'd like, but do see plenty of open time ahead to develop the site. We're in this for the long haul and I cannot imagine how much better it'll be in a year

[Carl]

Good news  . I will be putting the new design up for tomorrow. Jon was gracious and helped me with a couple of problems related to sizing, and we've finally got it all figured out. I will be going through pages and making minor adjustments, but don't see a reason to hold up people from getting to enjoy this. On the weekends, we cross over 40% mobile visits so those folks would be better served to have the new design sooner rather than later. Title tweaks for the new font shouldn't hold that back

[Carl]

It's now near midnight, so I've uploaded the changed guides to the server. The new design is live! I'll share it with other sites tomorrow so that folks can check it out 

[Nettlejuice]

Love it, great work  It's so much easier to navigate now.

[MarianT]

I went to look something up in the guide, and found that the new format is up! It looks great, with the main categories well-defined. I'm sure that as we get more expansion packs, this format will keep things well-organized.

[Carl]

Glad you like it, @MarianT. That is something I told Jon about this new design - it's not just better for readers, it's better for me too. I struggle to organize things when we get toward 100+ pages, as can be seen on the old design. It's just a game with many systems and a lot of possible articles with numerous categories to create. With so much more room for navigation, it will take significantly less thought to figure out where to put some new content. I expect it will evolve over the years, but hope to make sure it's always easy to look something up. We shouldn't actually need a search function for the guide if I can do this right...

[Nutella]

I really like the navigation on the new design, much more organized and easy for me to find stuff.

[MarianT]

@Carl, I have occasionally used the "search" function, so would hope you wouldn't do away with it. On the other hand, given the frequency of repeating questions in the forum, it's possible that I'm in a very small minority. I don't know whether a "search" function is an additional cost. If it is, you might consider polling the members to see how many of us use it.

[Joria]

I've used the search engine quite a bit in the past but I'm finding with the new layout I don't need it.  LOVE the new guide, Carl.  Thanks to you and Jon for all the hard work.

[Carl]

@MarianT I actually just mean incorporating the Google search we use here into the guide. The Forum has a good place to search both guide and Forum, and while I'll probably put it in the guide when it gets much bigger, it's just not necessary now. I do want guide visitors to eventually get to search the Forum, since there is a lot of technical help and miscellaneous info that is only found here

I'm really grateful for the feedback, so thanks guys for letting me know how you feel. I talked to IronicBeauty who has told me that the ad issues are much improved now, and I'm glad to hear it.

[IronicBeauty]

I've navigated through every page and I'm astounded at how improved the loading speed is. This on an internet connection that is a good bit of the time not any better than a mobile device. Even when our speed went down to single digits the site still loaded well. Its the whole complete package, with already great content, now it has 10x better navigation and loading speed! Aesthetics are pretty stellar too.    A great labor of love all around!

[LenaLJ]

@Carl Under the menu, under Guides -> Gameplay info, I think there are two errors, a menu point name ">" unclickable, and the menu point "Deepwoods" is standing as "Deepwoods (or)"

[Carl]

Thanks Lena. The first was just a leftover character causing a blank line to appear, the second is meant to be Outdoor Retreat, though I may have to find a better way to list those in the navigation so that people without the GP/EP don't bother.

[LenaLJ]

Thanks Lena. The first was just a leftover character causing a blank line to appear, the second is meant to be Outdoor Retreat, though I may have to find a better way to list those in the navigation so that people without the GP/EP don't bother.

Ahh like that I took as a part of the programming an (or) and not the short version

[justproud2b]

@Carl @Jon  The site looks great. Good job both of you