Hopefully it will be another large database like Pouet, anyway, best wishes and good luck for the portal here :)

Thanks a lot man :)

Yeah, the amount of work you guys put into this is pretty mindblowing. I hope this place grows up to the wikipedia of the demoscene.

Pretty chuffed to find myself already on here :) excellent work!

I just saw the new frontpage.WTF!?.
Well, i admired the old one for its cleanness and structured, basic design, not really missing anything. That is - when i think about it - a strength that demozoo has with respect to design and in comparison to all the overflooded sites like pouet or bitfellas. Beautiful....it was..

That seems to be gone. Too bad. The new frontpage is a flooded mess.

I really do hope that this is not the road you are going.

What exactly do you consider to be "flooded" about it?

CONS: Sad to hear you're not happy with the redressing of the front page. It was a wish from several of us to present more information on the first page, so that we can surface more of the actual work being done - and it doesn't look dead unless there's a party going on. That being said, we're always open to new ideas, so if you have some creative input on how we can make it look better, please tell us :)

I suppose you know how the frontpage looked before :). big banner, top 3 to 5 news and 3 to 5 latest active forum threads. Clean and simple.
Now it has added: upcoming patries, latest additions, latest comments, new releases, new in the archive. And with those lists a bunch of big graphics and icons. Thats what i call a lot of information, all trying to catch the eye, saying "here, i am important information". Most of it works as a distractor for me.
I would be surprised if the "new in the archive" list hasn't a high rotation of information, due to the fact that you are so busy adding stuff. So, for a visitor like me who is not here on a daily basis, i won't catch all that is/was listed there? so the information value for that list for me is close to none.
I ask myself, what does the site want to be? I thought if it as an almanac, as an archive of scene activity, a database of complete productions. Now i feel it wants to be a newssite, party calendar, forum community, maybe video and audio streaming platform (in the future) too. So basically it wants to be "everything".
You may think i am going to say it can't but, i won't do that, because i think its possible. But throwing every information in your face in one page does more harm than good imho. Why not put a few big buttons as a front end and let the user decide which part he wants to go to. Clean, simple, thats what makes the visual experience and choice for the user easier. And i am not exaggerating when i say, that i love(d) Demozoo for being brave to go that way and not following Pouet and Bitfellas with their ALL-IN-ONE design. You're overfreighting it now.

If you want the user to know what was/is going on and make it look more active, why not put one information on those area-buttons i mentioned. And being not an actual content information but something like this : News-Area (5 new news since last visit), Database Additions (234 new additions since last visit) etc. blablabla. So you see, the community/Website is active and the visitor is still left with the choice which of those information to access, rather than getting all of it directly thrown into his/her face.

I kinda second CONS. I mean there's no information for non sceners what the site is all about afaik. So most visitors might get news, new releases etc from other sites (e.g. pouet) in the first place. And as CONS said there is a lot of rotation of informations (e.g. added prods or comments) and since you can't surf past the last 10 it seems to be unnecessary to have them (at least for me).

But there are always people who don't like this change and that extra. And since I get a glimpse at the work you guys put into that project when I add/edit something myself I want to point out that the opinion above is just an opinion :)

menace: if there would be some counter telling "now serving xxxxxxx productions" on top or something the site won't be looking dead at all. Or something like xx prods added today. I think there is no need to "fake" activity by showing e.g. latest comments - which aren't necessarily connected to the growing of the database.

@sensenstahl
That counter is indeed there. Its just at the bottom :
Now serving...
55599 productions 26084 graphics 53658 music tracks 12877 groups 41809 sceners

And of course its just my opinion and since its your site, you can do whatever you wish and i have to live with that :)

@CONS: I meant my words, it had nothing to do with your posting :) And yes the counter is there but as you said at the bottom. If it would be more at the top it would catch attention and showing that the site is not dead indeed.

I understand what CONS is saying but I think Demozoo's current front page can not be compared to either Pouet or Bitfellas. It is not anywhere near as cluttered as them and the layout is much more thought out and polished. As long as it's not trying to overdo it, e.g. add even more stuff than what is shwon at present, the new design totally works for me (on a 24" wide screen). I think it's great but yeah, there's the risk of overdoing it of course ;)

forum needs an edit button tho ... !!$§%§

SunSpire (and previous commenters): Thanks for your feedback, once again.

We have a couple of tweaks coming, which hopefully reduces clutter :)

:)

You may have noticed that the fontpage has been tweaked again to hopefully look a bit less crowded.

Very nice I must say !

[quote]Saga_Musix - 02:18 20 June 2015 #
You may have noticed that the fontpage has been tweaked again to hopefully look a bit less crowded.[/quote]

Since i didn't even notice the difference, I would say.. not really.

@SunSpire
yeah, BitFellas and Pouet are pretty much a mess.

Achievment unlocked! I guess you have seen that I have linked up "a8.fandal.cz" a lot during the past weeks. They claim to have "2778 demos" listed and now everything that wasn't already in our database is NOW and all entries have backlinks to fandal.

offtopic(?): damn you guys are fast with adding prods of running parties :D

sensenstahl: Thanks :) Atually, we do try and do it "live" while compos are running, if possible (if there is a stream that one of us can follow, if we are present at the party (and not too... happy) or if we even have time), so people can start commenting and adding info immediately. One of my goals for the site is that we can be _THE_ place where people follow parties as they happen, and we have a bunch of tickets open for functionality related to that, but alas we only have the one, overworked, full-time developer.

Patches (and regular developers) more than welcome. :)