The New Shiny Escapist

[F4LL3N]

I'd like the option to change themes. I like black/dark backgrounds with bright text (pink, orange, whatever). Which is kinda the opposite of what's current.

Fixing the lag is the most important thing though. It's terrible. The layout feels kinda messy too. But that's something you can get used too.

 

[hashtag]

I like the new menu's. The drop down feature works nicely and makes the homepage much less cluttered. Not a huge fan of the white background and new font's, but I can live with that.
What I can't live with, is the site now takes at least a minute to load anything. It's seriously unacceptable. I never had that problem with the old design and it seems like the Escapist is just telling me to go fuck myself.

 

[Diminished Capacity]

This new layout makes me kind of sad.

Not just because change is difficult. It makes me feel like this isn't the site that I've been frequenting for several years. The content that I've become so familiar with is now hiding behind tabs and menus. All of the fonts are blurry and hard to read.

All of these things make me not want to navigate the site anymore.

 

[Zelgon]

I don't know if anybody mentioned this already but... I'm using the latest firefox and I can't see the nav bar. I can only see the buttons when I hover over them, any other time the whole bar is white.

I really liked the old layout to be honest. I always jumped to the end to read the news, now the new is in a small box? I respect the hell out of the escapist but I don't know... I hope this isn't the final layout...

 

[anthony87]

I know the Pub Club members get access to some exclusive stuff now and then, but SOME word of a change to the rest of us would've been nice. Not telling us anything just because we're not all shelling out money for a membership just seems, I dunno....kinda petty.

Anyways, same as everyone else. Miss the video sidebar, seems to bright and wide open. I'm sure I'll adjust.

(Now lets see if this will actually work. My last 4 or 5 posts have been eaten)

 

[Phoenixlight]

Don't fix what isn't broken,or do whatever, I don't care. Also, everything seems to take longer to load for some reason.

 

[emechbjm]

Seems like a blatnat http://www.gameinformer.com/ copy with cluttering for added measure. The old style reflected the journalistc overtones this site had. With most of the feature videos jumping too another site that is too "cool" to be taken seriuosly, this gamestop/ebs magazine style further devalues the sites image. Looks I'll be seeing you on Wednesdays only.....

Also: "I just wish we still had the sidebar that went straight to the shows..."

Must the this years look - ANOTHER bland varaition: http://www.eurogamer.net/

 

[toastmaster2k8]

I closed the escapist by accident when it was the old look ( weird to say that) and when I re-opened the site a minute later, it was like this. My first thought was i went on to the wrong site and went back to search....

OT: Im not enjoying this.

 

[KingmanHighborn]

The New Shiny Escapist

Culminating the last six months of hard work here behind the scenes, this revision not only creates a more beautiful and readable site, but also includes substantial new underlying technologies. This new tech facilitates easier navigation, more contextually relevant articles, greater social integration, and expanded user customization.

Eh...no you may of put alot of work into this but you broke something that was great as is. But the revision is painful on the eyes, the feedback here has proven this. And the navigation is now annoying without the sidebar to the comics and shows. The rest is...meh... okay. And yeah page loads and videos are slower then youtube on a bad day.

So today The Escapist launches fresh and new, expanding on the previous site with a cleaner, more open design with features that will make it easier to find what is new, what is hot, and to explore our enormous archive of favorites. We received a great amount of feedback on the presentation of our content, and we listened. Some highlights of the changes you can see today on the site are:

The problem is clean and open is just white space and it takes away from the style of the site, it looks more like a professional newspaper and that's a bad thing for this kind of site. It's also not as streamlined as it was. And it's harder to find the videos and comics I like

More Open Design - We have added a lot of "air" to the site overall, whether on the front page or individual content pages.



We have completely revamped our navigation bar to be fully dynamic, constantly updating with the newest items with automatic user customization.


We are excited to present the new site to you, but this isn't the end of the story of course. We have already received fantastic input from the Publisher's Club and implemented many of their suggestions. We look forward to your comments as you experience the changes and get comfortable with the new site.



We appreciate everything you, the readers, have done to make the site what it is today. This place would not be the same without your voice!

And here again 'air' is bad on a website. It's like these new Hershey bars that have air pockets in them, they may be 'light and fluffy' but it's a hell of alot less of the chocolate I pay for. And the navigation is not dynamic, it's directly opposite of that. It's sterile, and plain. You should of also asked the whole of the community and not just Pub Club members. That is a very narrow feedback source. I for one appreciate you trying to make the site better, and you may of put alot of work into this, but a lot of work went into making the Edsel as well, and we see what happened there. Please listen to our voices and at least give us the option of using the old style instead of this monstrousty if we don't like it.

Thank you.

 

[khabok]

Oh dear, where to even begin...

Most of these blues are far too light to appear on a white background, and they don't go TOGETHER very well, either.

The typography all renders either hideous, illegible or both. Some of it is even light gray on white, are you doing this on purpose or something?

The entire right-hand nav looks like banner ads, all garish contrast desperately vying for attention.

The Popular Forum Post tabs look like they should jigsaw but they DON'T.

The Twitter feed lacks any appreciable unitization.

The total lack of liquidity is wasting half of my monitor.

The upper nav menus are... incomplete or something? I'm actually not too sure what they're trying to show me.

Animations are very jerky.

Ghostery's blacklist is going apeshit, but that's not actually new.

Is there anything NEW here? I can't find a single thing on here that adds value for the user.


tl;dr turn back your crazy idiots, every minute you spent working on this was wasted.

 

[figday]

Well..

- The dropdown menu is quite a nice touch
- The colour scheme is too white and bright, and i thought i opened 1up by mistake
- The lag, especially the video, please do something about it
- The news menu is too small, I still prefer the old one because

That's all for now, I'll prolly add more later. But yeah, as others have already mentioned, it's too damn bright.

 

[Michael826]

My only problem with the new layout is my browsers new-found inability to load anything on this site. It took 5 minutes to load this thread, I kid you not.

 

[Yeager942]

My first reaction was: THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT?

But I'm beginning to get around to it.

 

[JonnyHG]

Looks like they decided to take a page from the new Xbox dashboard and have advertisements be the largest pictures.

 

[skywolfblue]

It looks like facebook now. Like... the current facebook. The bad one. With boxes and feeds everywhere, and everything way too spread out and inefficient.

Before it was compact, streamlined, efficient, and warm. Now, its facebook.

This. The old site was very functional and readable. This new version has way too many "in your face" icons and boxes that just clutter and make it hard to read.

 

[Zenron]

I've had this for awhile because of Pub club, so I'm used to the new site a little bit. There's still a few things that I really don't like about this layout though. The first of which is the fact that at the bottom of videos now, the facebook plugin only takes up half the width it used to, and that just doesn't look good at all, especially when you consider that the content that is shoving it to the side is pretty much useless.

The other thing which I don't like about the new site is the way the content is layed out on the first page. Simply because it's erratic with apparently no order to it. There was nothing really wrong with the way the new videos were shown at the top of the screen in narrow blocks. There really is no need to feature one video in a huge block as it is now. It just makes noticing new content more difficult. If you're going to do this, then you're better off doing what a lot of other sites do and have one larger image which acts as a slideshow of all the newer content. Similarly, some of the news is also randomly larger than the rest of it, seemingly for no reason as well. Both of these are focused on the left and the graphical side of me wants to just shout at you for creating an imbalance. It kind of niggles at me every time I enter the site.

Also concerning the first page is the news box which used to take up double the space at the bottom of the page. There doesn't really seem to be any reason to shove it to one side. It just makes the page seem cluttered. In fact now that I look at it, the front page is filled with a lot of useless information. There are three different boxes for news stories aside from the main ones. Do we really need the self scrolling news bar? Is that really necessary? Is the box for stories from facebook necessary? Is your twitter necessary?

I like most of the things to do with the new layout. My suggestions would be to restore the featured videos/articles etc to the original method as to stop the imbalance, remove all the clutter and restore the news and facebook plugin to their original widths.

Aside from that, I really do like this update. The menu bar is great, the fact that it actually mentions what kind of content it is under each image is really useful, and I don't really mind the bright background all that much.

 

[mad825]

Too bloody bright. Even MS word is less subtle than this.


...No, I'm not turning my light on.

 

[pspman45]

can we get the option to change it back?
all of the white is annoying, and I liked the blue that was everywhere

 

[Stammer]

I don't really mind it so much. Or at least, I wouldn't if it worked a little bit better. Seriously, the pages take easily three times longer to load, and half the time I have to refresh the page because it doesn't even load properly.

Other than that, it's just going to take some getting used-to.