Website Redesign

[Karawasa]

I've been toying with the idea of redesigning the main website for quite sometime now. Rather than blurb,

http://www.playdota.com/

I love their site.

At the moment, I am thinking about basically copying their site. We would replace the hero graphics banner with our own. Same goes for the shield logos. I'd fit in a few spaces for ads. We'd do the towers/creeps like they do heroes. I'd consolidate the various game information into "Mechanics" and "Learn the Game." I'd get some sort of build explorer to replace the build lists (i.e. some interactive thing where you add elements or select a build and see what comes up, maybe with some analysis).

What do you guys want to see on the main website? How should it look? What features should it have?

[Karawasa]

Speaking of changes to the site, perhaps it is time to consider an alternative form of ads on the forums. Say we got rid of the video banner at the top and the link ad at the bottom. In place of these we would use,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IntelliTXT

[Kaini]

Okay first to the website:

A good mainpage and a good layout is obviously a must have. But I am not sure if it is the right way to concentrate on the mainpaige. I would focus lots more on the forums.

The forums are easy to maintain and we could easily make a very good skin for it. (Afiak IPB uses templates and CSS) I think the ingame (http://www.ingame.de/ - its a pitty that is German and I can't demonstrate it) guys made that very well. IMHO they have got very ugly main pages but the forums are really cool and you can find everything there. Guides, Strategies and so on - lot's more than on a mainpage because it is difficult to track all guides and include them into mainpages. Addional if guides are in the forums users can easily ask question and post correction wishes.

In my opinion a good main page is lots less important than a good and well strucutred forum with an active community.

Okay assume you ignored everything I wrote before my ideas for the mainpage:

We need a very good nice eye catching logo!

The site should be perfectly integrated with the forums and other things (store for example). Nothing is more ugly than a site split up in more subsites witch are all totally different.

I wonder why you like dark colors that much. I mean Element TD is a quite "colorful" game. (Green, Red, Blue, Black, White/Yellow and Brown).

I am suggesting to use a CMS instead of reinventing the wheel. I know that typo3 is very flexible - but very complicated. But there are lots others too.

To the ads: I think inline ads are quite discreete, they have never bothered me.

[holepercent]

Interactivity for both.

the forums have the shoutbox. main site too?

build generator - click the elements, the output is the towers that can be built and their elemental damage types. (interactive build list)

forum highlights - recent threads in the forums.

forum guides - links to the key guides in the forums. (rather than placing the guide in the main site directly where the original editor cannot make changes)

[DDRKirby(ISQ)]

the dota site layout is fine. front page is too cluttered though. i hate front pages that are like that.

our forum is imho too sparse. maybe i missed something but the population/activity rate that we are at right now does not justify having this many subforums. Part of the reason i feel so unmotivated with this forum atm is because there are way too many places to check. Some of these subforums are definitely overdue for cleanup (3 topics and 30 posts in a subforum that has nothing to do with etd at all...?).