Site Design

So about this login thing: I'm going to throw my support behind most of what Flint has said, my only concern is that it may discourage visitors from posting comments if there's no easy/ obvious way for them to log in to wordpress. I know we want to drive discussion on the forums, but I value our article comments in a separate way. A lot of people sometimes like to comment on articles but don't necessarily want to jump in the pool completely (the pool being the forum).

Does Wordpress/ our articles support Disqus?

I'm going to go out on a limb and say, without checking, that WP/Disqus integration exists. There's really no reason why it wouldn't.

Bear in mind, however, that, one, there is a login link in the comment section of every article, as I said before, and two, it's possible to comment without logging in. So I'm not sure you need to be concerned.

Oh yeah that's fine then, as long as it's in the place where people would look for it. For the record we're only all looking for it at the bottom of the front page because that's where it was before, not because that's functionally or visually a place it should go (IMO, @everyone).

Okay... so I poked around the front page and menu/index pages to see what needed the most fixing...

Major caveat to all this. I was not involved with any of the front page redesign/reorganization so if any of this stuff was already hashed out and decided there, feel free to ignore me and link me to the appropriate posts. Another minor caveat is that I have a tendency for minimalist designs and prefer text over images when it comes to prioritizing screen real estate, which tends not to be how websites are done nowadays...


Here's what our current site map looks like. There's mainly two main menus: The Home Page and The Compendium. Between the two there's a lot of overlap in content. There's also two different styles of menus/indexes and that should probably be standardized. The main difference between the two menus/indexes is that one is automated and the other is custom Wordpress Pages.

The Automated menus/indexes are the Audiobooks, Translations and Analysis pages. The News page should also probably be one (specifically this one), but the menu button currently links to the Home page. Technically the Archive is also one, but there's a lot of other stuff going on on that page. The nice thing about these menus is that articles are added to them automatically as long as the categories/tagging is done right. The bad part is that there can only be six articles per page and if the article has an image attached to it (for the front page) that is displayed too. This leads to having over half the screen filled with large images and two links if images are present or having around five links on the screen if there isn't any images. On menus like the Audiobooks, this isn't that bad as there's only eleven articles in that category, but on menus like Analysis (35+ articles) or Translations (100+ articles), this leads to having 9+ pages to click though to see what articles are under that category. The other bad part is that it doesn't look like it's possible to further organize articles into categories within the menu's they're on. So there's currently no way to separate the non-FFVII translations into their own category and keep them on the Translations menu.

The Custom Wordpress menus/indexs are the Compendium page (and all the links found on it) and the Highlights page. The nice thing about these pages is the amount of links crammed into one page. The Guide Book Translations page and the Translations page have nearly the exact same links on them, but one involves clicking though 20 pages to see all the links, while the other involves scrolling down the screen more. These pages also allow for further categorization within a menu without having to add more menus. The bad part is that it's not automated. If an article isn't added to the correct page then it's really easy for it to fall between the cracks. So there's a lot more upkeep involved. It also means that if it doesn't get edited no new content gets on it (IE: we should probably re-evaluate what's on the Highlights page).

The Archive page is its own can of worms. The archive page before the redesign was simply done by month, so the fact that it's now done by category is a huge help. Unfortunately, there's no way know what all the categories are without scrolling to the end of the page. The categories are displayed in order alphabetically with the last five articles in each category under them. Given that we've got 24 categories, this has resulted in a very long, hard to navigate page. Given that this page is more of an administrative thing then a main navigational menu, it could probably stand a re-design. I've got an idea that makes use of a Custom Wordpress menu/index, but I'll sit on it until we figure out which index/menu style we're going with.

The menu is not set in stone at all, so feel free to talk remap. I consider what's currently there a stopgap/ placeholder. Just make sure things get the appropriate attention (unused text for example). We need to rework the entire site map IMO.

Yes, there's no need to worry that you're stepping on anyone's toes with the menu, because nothing has really been decided yet. I just threw together what I considered to be the most important top-level links and said "I'll sort this out later". (Which I would have done, eventually; I've just been busy with other things like writing new articles and editing old ones.)

Don't let your thinking be constrained by what's there at the moment, either. We don't have a binary choice between static custom pages and dynamic auto-generated lists as they currently exist; we can do whatever we want, including making changes to either one or combining the two. For example, the images in the auto-generated lists don't have to stay as they are. That's just the theme default.

I guess the site map is the place to start, but the more important question is "what do we want" rather than "what do we have now". Coming up with an answer to that question is something I can definitely be involved with, but it should primarily be guided by (1) our content creators, and (2) our visitors. For the latter, we have Google Analytics, and if you want access to it, it's fine by me. I think Yop and I are the only ones with it at the moment.

Yase; if anything, you'll want to set goals (like flint said), measure in how far those goals are met now, and experiment in e.g. menu layout to determine whether changes improve or reduce said goals. You can set targets and everything in GA.

Someone on Twitter is having trouble loading the site on both chrome and Firefox. I suggested they clear their cache and history but apparently that didn't work, and they're saying it won't load in private browsing mode either. Apparently this has been going on since January? It must be something on their end, but I can't work it out. I'll direct them to this thread but would someone mind looking into this?

Kinda hard to look into it without more information.

Is it just https://thelifestream.net or is it also https://thelifestream.net/forums? (I guess we'll find out if they post here.)

Does attempting to visit the site produce a blank page, an error like this one, an error like this one, an error like this one, some sort of incomplete page, or does it just load forever? If no HTML is being served at all then it's unlikely to be the site design at fault.

What sort of content settings are they using? The site should work with cookies and scripts disabled (though I just checked and it looks different without JS – I should fix that) but it would be good to know anyway. I know they said they tried private browsing but are there any extensions running in that mode anyway which would could be interfering?

Hi! I'm the person in question. It's giving me a completely blank page when I try to get to any page of the site on a mid-40s version of Firefox and the highest version of Chrome that work on WinXP Tablet.

I get the same in Firefox 47 on a Win7 PC (and I just double-checked, I have the same problem in Safe Mode with all add-ons disabled as well), but this morning I discovered the site does work with Chrome 56.0.2924.87 (64-bit) on the Win7 PC- which is how I'm able to get here at all.

My old bookmark for the News page on the XP Tablet machine does get me to that page, but clicking anything just reloads the News page.

Let me know what more info I can give that would be of help!

Thanks for registering, hoping some of our more techy people can get to the bottom of this for you, whether it's on our end or yours . This is a better format than Twitter to discuss things at length/ in a bit more detail.

Lex said:

Thanks for registering, hoping some of our more techy people can get to the bottom of this for you, whether it's on our end or yours . This is a better format than Twitter to discuss things at length/ in a bit more detail.

Click to expand...

Thanks! Hopefully it's just something on my end that can be fixed and isn't affecting the site for others. Just weird that it's happening on two different machines and various browsers/versions.

Very strange. Your two machines share an internet connection, I'm assuming?

My hunch is that there's a problem with the connection, but this really isn't my area of expertise. You could try opening up a cmd terminal and typing


to see if that fixes it. It can't do any harm, at least.

No matter whose "end" it ends up being, thanks for reporting the problem to us.

Flintlock said:

Very strange. Your two machines share an internet connection, I'm assuming?

My hunch is that there's a problem with the connection, but this really isn't my area of expertise. You could try opening up a cmd terminal and typing

Code:

ipconfig /flushdns

to see if that fixes it. It can't do any harm, at least.

No matter whose "end" it ends up being, thanks for reporting the problem to us.

Click to expand...

No problem! And yeah, both machines are on the same connection. Gave the DNS flush a shot and no dice there.

Let me try a thing. I've got a Browserstack account and can use it to connect to TLS from older browsers; can confirm that Firefox 47 doesn't seem to work, can't yet figure out why not. Might have to do with the HTTPS connection, although I'd expect to see errors.

Seeing errors on Chrome 49: "ERR_SPDY_INADEQUATE_TRANSPORT_SECURITY". A cursory googling basically states that our security is stricter than what older browsers and operating systems support.

Chrome 56 on Windows 7 does work, as does the latest version of Firefox.

So, long story short: Windows XP doesn't work because it does not support the stricter encryption we support for our webpage. I'm not sure if I could lower the security settings (because we use a 3rd party provider that doesn't seem to offer any configuration options). Maybe I could detect older browsers / OSes, or probably not forcing a redirect to HTTPS would work. I'll do some googling to see if I can disable https for older browsers (although off course I'd rather not due to security issues), or at least show a message.

Cthulhu said:

Let me try a thing. I've got a Browserstack account and can use it to connect to TLS from older browsers; can confirm that Firefox 47 doesn't seem to work, can't yet figure out why not. Might have to do with the HTTPS connection, although I'd expect to see errors.

Seeing errors on Chrome 49: "ERR_SPDY_INADEQUATE_TRANSPORT_SECURITY". A cursory googling basically states that our security is stricter than what older browsers and operating systems support.

Chrome 56 on Windows 7 does work, as does the latest version of Firefox.

So, long story short: Windows XP doesn't work because it does not support the stricter encryption we support for our webpage. I'm not sure if I could lower the security settings (because we use a 3rd party provider that doesn't seem to offer any configuration options). Maybe I could detect older browsers / OSes, or probably not forcing a redirect to HTTPS would work. I'll do some googling to see if I can disable https for older browsers (although off course I'd rather not due to security issues), or at least show a message.

Click to expand...

Aha! Glad to know I at least provided enough info to get things on the right track.

Took a look at all the categories we had (in the archives) and what was in them.

Findings are spoilered below. The dates are when the most recent article in a given category was published.


From what I could tell, we've got a couple of main categories of articles.

First is all the Square Enix gaming related news. Whether that's what's happening at SE or what game is coming out next, that's what it feels like most of our recent articles are. I'd include interviews here as well.

Second is all of the translations of FFVII stuff that's only available in Japanese as well as all the crazy game stuff people have found by digging around in game files. Currently, most of that is mixed in with the news stuff. A Sub-category of this is all the other FF game translations we have and those are also mixed in with the FFVII and news stuff.

The next major category is the analysis. A lot of this (specifically the older articles) are FFVII only stuff, but we also have a lot of analysis of the FF series as a whole. Then there's some articles that form series that should probably be organized better. I don't know if I would include some of the community rankings/polls/etc, but a lot of those also have commentary in them and are in series format as well.

With the way the categories are set up, most of our main content looks like Square Enixx news. It's not until you go though the main menu that the game translations can be easily looked though. Given that that's one of the more unique things about the site, (especially if you're not looking at the forums), I think those should be easier to find

Remember that some categories are parents of others. The parent categories are "items of interest", "Lifestream projects" and "news". Nothing should be directly filed under those categories, though I notice some things are – I've spent years trying to get people to follow the category guidelines I set out and people still ignore them. I'll clean those up now. Still, when you list all the posts of those categories, you'll see everything from their child categories as well, which is why they look huge.

Ah, thanks! That explains a lot.

I've made a few changes to the categories.

Our "items of interest" categories were so underused that I moved them into the other two parent categories, "news" and "Lifestream projects". I added this information to our categories and tags thread:

I said:

News is for things that happen outside TLS (like game releases, trailers, etc.) while Lifestream projects is for anything we make ourselves.

Note that you don't need to categorise an article as both "News" and "Square Enix" (for example) because the News category page automatically shows everything in its sub-categories.

Click to expand...

There's also a new category, "spotlight". It's mostly articles from the old "fan creations" category, but also some other stuff, like this, which was previously in a "trivia and contests" category which only had three articles, and this, which used to be all on its own in an "achievements" category.

Spotlight is a new sub-category of news. It's designed for things which aren't our projects but also aren't from "official" sources, e.g. fan works.

Click to expand...

I made a couple of slight changes to the menu: "news" now points to the actual news category, and the ordering has changed a little so we have, from left to right, category-category-category-category-page-page-page-page-forum. I'm not saying it should stay like that but it makes a bit more sense than what we had.

I also made a change I'd been meaning to make since working on the site design on our test site: the category swatches on the front page (and elsewhere) are now colour-coded according to whether they're news or projects. The deep red, #481519, is the complementary colour to our primary colour, #154844.

Finally, this isn't really site design, more site maintenance, but I deleted a load of pointless self-pingbacks and added a bit of code to our functions.php file to prevent them from being generated in the future. I also removed a lot of spam comments that had managed to get through our filter.

Thank you as always Flinty <3

I am TLS's (mostly) humble servant.

And I almost forgot: I also made a new "editorials" category, which should be pretty self-explanatory.

Just for everyone's information, the new front page theme is still a work-in-progress and always will be; such is the nature of these things. I make small changes practically every other day and usually consider them too small to post about here. Today, for example, I tweaked the appearance of the Everlightbox plugin which generates image galleries for us (such as the one here &#8211; click one of the images to launch it) by un-italicising the caption font and by making the button overlay fade in and out on hover. Yesterday there was a somewhat bigger change, as I updated our staff list.

Here's my current to-do list, in no particular order:

• Replace JS "slider" with non-JS
• Sort out the menu with Obs' help
• Make sure SE's copyright policy is linked somewhere &#8211; I might move the RSS feed link in the footer to accommodate it
• Create custom sidebars for certain article series
• Restore the category swatches to /category/news/, etc.
• Adjust mobile banner size
• Adjust tablet font size (No need; my preview was at 75% zoom without me realising it)
• Keep updating old articles and pages (this will definitely take forever)

If you think something should be added to that list, please post it here!

Nice work Flint!

Flintlock said:

by making the button overlay fade in and out on hover.

Click to expand...

Shademp PM'd me earlier today to ask why his new post wasn't showing up on the front page. Tetsujin also wondered the same thing when he last made a post. I did provide instructions here (opening post, first edit) but I get that it's an easy thing to forget, so I've found a workaround: the query no longer checks if that box is ticked. I tested it on our test site and it seemed to do the trick, so I uploaded it to the front page. The box basically does nothing now, which is fine, because we want all our new posts to appear on the front page anyway.

Authors, you no longer need to worry about making sure that box is ticked when you publish a new post. You can hide the whole "post custom settings" section, if you want to, by deselecting it in "screen options" (top right) if it's not hidden already. The only thing we might want to use it for is the "spotlight" feature, but that's completely optional.

I'm still intending to replace that whole section with something that looks identical but doesn't use Javascript, but this is a handy change in the meantime. Thanks to Shad for inadvertently prompting me to look into it again.