Hi everyone,

This is my first post and serious visit here since you guys moved to the new forum. I have to say, I'm impressed with the customisation that's been done to phpBB. Who's responsible for that?

I wanted to let you all know that An Younggil (8p) and me (David Ormerod) started a new Go site a few months ago called Go Game Guru. We still have a lot of work to do, but we've gotten it to a stage where we would like some feedback about how we're going.

At the moment we have a blog and some other assorted pages. Ultimately we want to focus on trying to promote Go to new players, but we are still working on most of the beginner material, so it's not online yet. We would really appreciate it if anyone had the time and inclination to have a look at our site and give us some feedback. Some of the things we're interested in are:

1. Look and feel
2. Usability - what works, what's confusing or difficult to find?
3. Content - what would you like to see more or less of? Are the technical posts easy enough to follow?
4. Do you have any ideas you'd like to see us try?
5. Did you notice any technical problems with the site? (If so please let us know which browser you're using).

You can let us know what you think by either replying to this thread or emailing us through our site (if you prefer to keep something confidential).

Thanks in advance

_________________
David

Go Game Guru: Learn Go | How to Get Better at Go | Go Game Shop | Go Boards | Baduk TV

I've looked at the site once or twice before--I enjoyed the whole board problem from Maeda's game.

Two design issues that aren't too difficult to fix: on the front page under "what can I do here" you have a link to "learn how to play go" but it links to a page with no content. I'd remove the link and/or write "coming soon" or somesuch. Then you have duplicate links to the blog. Both of these have the potential to waste the user's time.

I think some of the pages go overboard on linking and boldface. See What is Go for boldface, Lee Sedol Top Prize Winner for linking. I think these both cross over from being useful to being a hindrance at times.

P.S. I think you need to add "http://" to that link to hankoomi.com on the Lee Sedol post I mentioned.

_________________
Occupy Babel!

I find the site incredibly busy and distracting. If I look at the main page, it seems that more than half of the page is taken up by cruft - the sidebar, banner, the sharing buttons, etc. When I look at an article, it's even worse because of the tag cloud. All that stuff is distracting.

First suggestion: make the sidebar narrower. It should be no wider than the text "Go Game Guru – Pages". You could make the fonts in the sidebar a tiny bit smaller; they are the same size as the body font in articles.

There's no need to have the Facebook, Twitter and RSS buttons in the top nav bar, as you have them - way too big, IMHO - in the sidebar.

Why do you have the same links in the top nav bar as in the top of the sidebar? You can surely get rid of one of them, if they are going to both display on every page. (And you have them in the footer as well; overkill?)

I don't like the banner image - glass stones? Why not real stones?

On post pages: below the post, you have three different lines of "share" buttons. Surely one is enough, as there is much overlap. These things don't need to be so big - such as the "like" and "tweet" buttons with text. If you want to keep them, get rid of the other versions. You seem obsessed with sharing; there's a total of _5_ Facebook buttons on each story page.

Personally, I like the story meta-info (date posted, "Add more comments" to be below the story, not below the title; it's distracting. In addition, the "add comments" bit is there twice, once at the top, once at the bottom.

The bit on the top with square graphics and story titles is interesting, especially because the main page doesn't list any dynamic content. But when you got to a story page, it's no longer there; you might want to consider having it on all pages.

This said, I believe in minimal web design, where the content stands out, not the cruft. (If you're curious, you can see my web site for an example.) If you want a more baroque design, that's obviously up to you.

_________________
My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville

1. Look and feel I like the look, and although repeating the same links on the top, bottom and side wastes space, it didn't bother me.


2. Usability - what works, what's confusing or difficult to find? To find the high quality content, "blog" is not where I would normally look. To me, your "blog topics" is the most important part of the website, and I find the name a bit misleading. It might be nice if the important sub-topics were more prominent on the front page, and perhaps news and study material could be kept separately.

3. Content - what would you like to see more or less of? Are the technical posts easy enough to follow? Both the game review and the article about Think Big in Go were high quality material. This is the main reason I would visit the site again. I like that you also offer news, but the material could use some editing - the article "Lee Sedol Top Prize Winner of 2010" for example is rather redundant.

Good start I think.

_________________
Patience, grasshopper.

Thanks for the frank and detailed feedback, it's been really helpful. We've made a lot of your suggested changes already and will make some more as time permits.

@hyperpape - I think we've followed all of your advice, please let us know if you think anything else still needs attention. Do you like the updated homepage or are there still too many links? Thanks for spotting all those problems.

@daal - Good point about content being difficult to find. I was worried about that too. I've tried to implement your ideas by breaking up the content in the sidebar and on the homepage. Please have a look and let me know if you think it works. I'm glad you liked the more technical Go content. To be honest I'd prefer to spend more time writing articles about interesting topics like that, which is what I really enjoy, but at the moment a lot of my spare time is going into the back-end of the website and other related things. Hopefully that will settle down soon because I've got a list of topics I'm keen to write about . You might also enjoy this article on induction, if you haven't seen it already: http://gogameguru.com/go-technique-induction/.

@kirkmc - I had a look at your site and I see your points about the layout. I'm working on fixing that, but since I'm not particularly good at web design and CSS, it'll take me awhile to find time and work out how to fix it without breaking anything. I didn't really notice how much real estate the sidebar was wasting until you pointed it out. I've gone a bit numb from seeing the site too many times now I guess.

We did remove some of the sharing buttons and agree that there were too many. There were a lot of them on the site for awhile while we were testing different possibilities and we hadn't got around to removing some of them. Thanks for the reminder. I've now setup a test environment so Younggil and I can experiment without interfering with the site,

On the stones, those are agate and they're the nicest stones I have, in my opinion. I actually prefer them to slate and shell, but you can't really see their beauty in that photo and I can see why you thought they were glass. If you're ever in Australia, you're welcome to come play a game and I'll show you .

Kirk and daal both touched on something we've been thinking about for awhile. Would it be better for the home page to just display recent posts (either as a standard list or with a online news/magazine layout)? We decided to setup the homepage the way it currently is because we were hoping to attract new players to the game (although we don't have the content to do that yet). We thought it would be too confusing if they were confronted with a bunch of news and technical articles, especially if they don't really know what Go is yet. However, we'd still have links like 'what is go?' up the top, so maybe not? What do you all think?

_________________
David

Go Game Guru: Learn Go | How to Get Better at Go | Go Game Shop | Go Boards | Baduk TV

Well, if the goal is to attract go players, then I'd say you want the front page to highlight the content that interests them. I think that much of the main page is wasted by the stuff about what go is. I'd suggest putting a very visible What is go? in a box somewhere, with a nice graphic showing part of a board and stones, and link that to a page with all the info. I'd want to have all the meta-info (what can I do here, etc.) not be the focus of the main page.

While one is not obliged to follow the standard blog technique - articles in reverse chronological order - you can't deny that web users are accustomed to that. While I do like your graphic squares with texts at the top, a more standard presentation of articles would be practical (though you can certainly keep those squares).

This said, the site's tagline is "Teaching go...", which makes one think that the site is about, well, teaching go. What's the focus going to be in the future? If news is the main focus, I'd change the tagline; if teaching is the focus, I'd highlight some teaching articles in the squares with the news articles. You can do both - which is what your site seems to do, and what the sidebar suggests - but maybe the tagline should be changed to reflect this.

_________________
My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville

Thanks for all your advice so far guys. We've been taking a lot of your comments on board and have worked on many changes over the last few weeks. Things are finally ready to go . It's been a long weekend for me rolling this out so I'll keep it brief.

If anyone feels like giving any feedback on the new design we'd be really grateful.

http://gogameguru.com/

_________________
David

Go Game Guru: Learn Go | How to Get Better at Go | Go Game Shop | Go Boards | Baduk TV

Ouch!

All those dark bars above the articles are distracting. You could have titles for sections without the backgrounds; it'd be a lot nicer. (And, the titles should be initial capped, at least for the first words.)

I find it extremely busy - the popular posts and recent comments sections don't really need to be there; I'd highlight the actual content (the articles in boxes) more by making them bigger and more attractive. And the sidebar is busy too.

Finally, you're showing recent posts in two places: in the recent posts section, and below, in the different categories. Given that you'll probably never have more than a half-dozen "recent" posts at a time, why do you need the category sections below, that just repeat the same info and graphics? Use the space to present more info about each post, rather than duplicate.

The Gomer Pyle photo is interesting, but totally un-go-related.

_________________
My blog about Macs and more: Kirkville

He's shocked, the article is about surprises--I think it's OK. But maybe they should have held out for Lee Changho doing a spit-take.

_________________
Occupy Babel!

Except for the "ouch" I agree with Kirk. Nonetheless, I think the changes that you have made so far have improved the site, and I really enjoyed your articles and An Young Gil's game commentaries. Bookmarked!

_________________
Patience, grasshopper.

Getting better and better.
I kind of dislike duplication too.

My first impression was that the site had got loads of stuff, or at least will have since some links may be more like placeholders and not lead anywhere yet.
But then when I started clicking around I noticed that menu items, links etc appeared up to three times on the same page.
So I left the site, believing it had virtually no interesting content.

But then this thread started and I came back.

/Mats

_________________
mohsart - games & books
http://spel.mohsart.se/

Thanks once again to all you Life in 19x19 members, who commented here or emailed us with advice.

We've shown the site to many friends (Go players and non-Go players) and have received a lot of helpful suggestions. Some things, like the recent comments and popular posts, are gone - to simplify the home page. Other things, like the post headings, are controversial, but we'll leave them as they are for now. The random posts and email newsletter subscription stuff in the top right will probably stay for awhile, until I have time to put something better looking there.

I agree with all of you who said that the recent posts and highlights from categories (4 boxes at the bottom) are annoying when they repeat things. This annoys us too. I think the way to fix this is not to take them away, but to keep adding a wider range of articles to the site.

We're going to stop tinkering with the design for awhile now and work on content. I'll be writing more technical articles and starting a series for beginners. Based on feedback, Younggil is going to spend more time on commenting professional games. Jing is joining us to take over Go news, and we hope you enjoy her articles. They will be better written than they were before.

If at any time you want to leave feedback, feel free to do so on this thread, or email us: http://gogameguru.com/contact/

Thanks,

David

_________________
David

Go Game Guru: Learn Go | How to Get Better at Go | Go Game Shop | Go Boards | Baduk TV

I've finally had some more time to work on the site and we've recently made a series of changes to the design and other things, which I've explained here: http://gogameguru.com/go-game-improved- ... phone-app/

As you will see, there's also a mobile optimized version of the site and a free wep-app for iPhone/iPad.

I went back over this thread and tried to follow some more of the good advice we received earlier. Again, your views (positive and negative) are most welcome. The small number of people who have given us feedback here or by email have really helped us.

Kirk, I don't know whether you will still think the site is too busy, but we have listened to your criticism and looked at your site (http://www.mcelhearn.com/), as well as others, quite a bit when revamping the design.

And finally, on the Go picture at the top. Yes this is the photo we used originally. I quite like this photo and my agate stones. I wonder if anyone can work out which game this position is from? Hint: One of the players writes at Go Game Guru .

Thanks,

David

_________________
David

Go Game Guru: Learn Go | How to Get Better at Go | Go Game Shop | Go Boards | Baduk TV