News Page...

[Gedd]

Probably not the best time to ask for this stuff since you guys are at E3, but is there any chance you could put a date/time stamp on the main news page?  It's kind of hard to tell what's new without it.  You could probably throw them in on the individual news posts as well.

Also, it appears that HTML isn't working in the news posts:

http://www.consolegold.com/e3/News/news.php?NewsID=76

[DarkEL]

Probably not the best time to ask for this stuff since you guys are at E3, but is there any chance you could put a date/time stamp on the main news page?  It's kind of hard to tell what's new without it.  You could probably throw them in on the individual news posts as well.

Also, it appears that HTML isn't working in the news posts:

http://www.consolegold.com/e3/News/news.php?NewsID=76

That's actually something I wanted to have on the articles when we left, but I just ran out of time to implement it. I agree that I like to see when things were posted as well.

As for that news article - I had that reporter fix it that same morning afte seeing your post. HTML does work - it's just that I gave them all a WYSIWYG editor to enter in their news articles. Someone just litterally typed in the <a href tags into the WYSIWYG so it displayed as text rather than as a link.

Simple mistake.

But thanks for pointing it out, I would have hated to have that showing up all FUBAR like that all day.

[Gedd]

No problem, DarkEl.  Glad to help.

You might also want to consider sticking author names up there somewhere, but I don't need to see that kind of stuff.

One other little nitpick, and this is more me being anal...on the main news page listing, my personal preference would be to have the system icons appear to the right of the titles instead of the left.  There's something oddly disconcerting about not having the titles of the new articles lining up.

That's a personal preference, but I think it gives a more finished look.

Ack, one other little nitpick...serifed fonts should really be avoided on web sites.  The rule I always heard was you use serif fonts for print stuff, sans serif for screen.  There's actual usability studies out there that verify it, but I'd have to dig to find them. slambie will back me up on this (assuming she sees this post ).

[DarkEL]

You might also want to consider sticking author names up there somewhere, but I don't need to see that kind of stuff.

Yeah I had that in my mind as well. We were kind of thinking of getting away from all the staff tags in the news as a means of reigning some of that in, but I agree that there's a bit of value in listing who wrote something (if for no other reason than to know who to blame ), so it'll probably be slipped in a very small font size

One other little nitpick, and this is more me being anal...on the main news page listing, my personal preference would be to have the system icons appear to the right of the titles instead of the left.  There's something oddly disconcerting about not having the titles of the new articles lining up.

I go back and forth on that one as well. On one hand I would like for titles to line up, but on the other hand it seems like having the system icons first makes it easier to scan the page for relevant system info (at least until we launch filters later this year) Plus if I moved them to the end - you have to worry about those fun little times when just the system images wrap and makes it look a little odd.

I'm not happy with the layouts yet, so I will keep experimenting.

Ack, one other little nitpick...serifed fonts should really be avoided on web sites.  The rule I always heard was you use serif fonts for print stuff, sans serif for screen.  There's actual usability studies out there that verify it, but I'd have to dig to find them. slambie will back me up on this (assuming she sees this post ).

Laff - I've actually read a bunch of those books too. If you notice we do actually use Sans Serif for all text except in the headlines (which most usability and design books I've read have recommended that Serif fonts are more readable for headlines -- the exact opposite of print). So the site should be positioned for much easier readability. Once I get out of code-crunch time, I'd like to spend some time revisiting the column-lengths and word/letter spacing to even further increase the readability of the site.