Opinions on a Sims 3 Site Design

[Carl]

Hi guys. I've learned a bit the past couple of years, and I realize that the sims 3 site on mobile is a bit of a travesty. I thought i'd gather opinions on redesigning the navigation (only for that part) sometime in the next month. What I'd like to do is make the left menu disappear when you're on a small screen, and replace it with a menu style similar to what is found on https://www.carls-fallout-4-guide.com

Desktop could use a redesign too, but I feel like a chunk of people would prefer that experience stay the same and easy to find. But mobile is another story.  While I did make it fit mobile screens a couple of years back, I never did modernize the navigation. For fat fingers it is probably near-unusable. Since people will play Sims 3 for at least a few more years, I thought I could do something to improve it. It's not nearly as useful from mobile devices and the way it fails to properly react to your screen is a problem. I think it's a no brainer but still thought it'd be wise to see what frequent users might think before dropping in a change like that.

[sdhoey]

Hi guys. I've learned a bit the past couple of years, and I realize that the sims 3 site on mobile is a bit of a travesty. I thought i'd gather opinions on redesigning the navigation (only for that part) sometime in the next month. What I'd like to do is make the left menu disappear when you're on a small screen, and replace it with a menu style similar to what is found on https://www.carls-fallout-4-guide.com

Desktop could use a redesign too, but I feel like a chunk of people would prefer that experience stay the same and easy to find. But mobile is another story.  While I did make it fit mobile screens a couple of years back, I never did modernize the navigation. For fat fingers it is probably near-unusable. Since people will play Sims 3 for at least a few more years, I thought I could do something to improve it. It's not nearly as useful from mobile devices and the way it fails to properly react to your screen is a problem. I think it's a no brainer but still thought it'd be wise to see what frequent users might think before dropping in a change like that.

Carl, I like the design of the Fallout guide. It has a nice clean look to it. It takes a few minutes to load on my phone and I have a Samsung 8+ and I have top shelve wi-fi.

[Carl]

@sdhoey I wonder if changes that I made last night improved the speed of that site at all. Maybe check tomorrow if you get a chance. Gonna crank the server back up for summer, since it's quite a bit busier at this time especially with a Sims 4 pack coming.

Moving that and Sims 3 to secure slowed them down, but I made them compatible with a new tech that makes things faster.

[Carl]

Saying it here so people might see it in recent posts. In around ~1h i'll restart the server so some hardware changes take effect. Let's hope it goes smoothly and we only see around 5 mins downtime.

[sdhoey]

@sdhoey I wonder if changes that I made last night improved the speed of that site at all. Maybe check tomorrow if you get a chance. Gonna crank the server back up for summer, since it's quite a bit busier at this time especially with a Sims 4 pack coming.

Moving that and Sims 3 to secure slowed them down, but I made them compatible with a new tech that makes things faster.

WOW that loaded fast on my phone Carl. Looked cleaner too.

[Carl]

We are back up with much faster cpu now @sdhoey thank you for being honest about the fallout 4 site's speed. Can't do much without someone telling me. A lot of times my PC/mobile do really well with them but experiences can be very different.

I noticed your  first comment was at 6pm and it was peak times, so it was even worse at that hour. Now we can handle afternoon traffic much better

[sdhoey]

I don't know what happened between last night and this morning, but now the page is all missed up.



I will try again in a bit to see if it clears up. 

[Seabody]

Can corroborate sdhoey's post. IPhone 7 running Firefox. Forgive my attaching the picture but as you can see its very late and I'm doing this on my phone.

[sdhoey]

Okay, its back to normal now. I don't want to spam you with pics but I wanted to you see.

[Carl]

It is fixed now, a bug that keeps coming back. I made a post on stackoverflow about it. I know how to correct it, but have to make a sacrifice (caching) to do so... browser caching images helps immensely with loading, because you already have them right?

Sadly this bug is really annoying because it works normally for a time then happens about 30 min after the server is restarted, so I don't notice it happening. My own browser caches it (and all others) so I can't see it is broken until it's been that wya a while. Very annoying, and many cache clears.

Thank you for making sure that I was aware. Things are stable now but I'll give it a shot if someone helps me with an answer, otherwise it's OK until I figure something out.