New SL home page?

They're not flash, they're AJAX (unless they've done something to detect FlashBlock). I don't know why they'd cause problems for others, as the load quickly enough for me.

I hadn't thought about the privacy issues, especially about the hidden groups, but YEAH - you know what else? If you are using the Forums, you need to log out TWICE.

If you are not logged into secondlife.com and you log into the Forums, you automatically get logged into secondlife.com as well. But if you log off the Forums, you are STILL logged on to secondlife.com.

You need to log off twice, Briana.

And yeah, the colors are butt-ugly.

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Fortunately, I don't see me using it much . I have this forum bookmarked, so I don't have to go to the main page. I use the Lindex inworld, and couldn't care less about their new blog and answers thingie. The rest of that page is of no interest to me. Once this forum is closed, I won't be visiting SL.com for any reason except to possible make changes in my account.

The events page and the xstreet marketplace page (and probably others I haven't tried) don't fit on my 1024x768 display.

Sigh.

I don't want a widescreen monitor.

You don't need a widescreen monitor. What are you using, CRT or LCD? Any monitor that's newer than 10 years old should be able to display a higher resolution than 1024x768.

The new dashboard is much simpler and easier to use. I don't mind the colour scheme, there's just enough colour to stop it from looking boring. It is a bit less friendly than the blue, though. Love the world map.
Did a different person make the style for Xstreet though? Might just be the featured item boxes.. they look really ugly.

I like it.

I don't want to set my resolution higher than 1024 x 768 on my non-widescreen monitors either.

I knew someone would read that wrong.

There have indeed been higher resolutions than 1024 x 768 around a long time, but only lately have large numbers of websites started to not fit. Why? New monitors are all LCD widescreens with native horizontal resolutions higher than 1024. The ReactionGrid site, for example, doesn't fit on my 1024 pixel wide display.

I don't want to and am not going to change my desired resolution in order to make the xstreetsl page fit.

I can use the browser's page zoom function, which will make the text too small, just as increasing the resolution would, but at least using the browser's page zoom function only affects the page you are on, not every single program on your computer.

For Firefox or Flock, there is an extension called NoSquint that can remember custom page zoom and text zoom values for specific sites or urls, which I have used in the past but uninstalled for some reason. Ahh, I see now, it's not up to date with Firefox, won't work on 3.5.

I see two FF extensions I haven't tried, Default FullZoom Level, and QuickPage Zoom, that look like they might be worthwhile.

I didn't know the text size was your problem, I assumed you had an ancient monitor or just hated change. My bad.

The width of the XStreet site may be part of the ugly problem. I'm used to sites being no wider than about 960px, since that's the standard, to support 1024px res of course. I recall the other merchant site that was bought out by LL (I forgot the name :C) had a decent layout, maybe they should emulate that. It still had categories on the left and content on the right, but everything was fixed-width and coherent, the only thing omitted was the descriptions.
I'm really just hoping they slapped up that layout just so it matches the rest of the site, now that it's more clearly integrated - and that they'll fix it to actually look good later on.

Yes, besides everything else, and there are way too many problems to mention here, there are also some monitor issues which should never have made it past testing. It was obviously designed by someone who has a widescreen and/or can run at larger than 1024x768 and expects everyone else to have either or both.

1. There is a scroll bar at the bottom of every page which is incredibly annoying, and it is only because of the empty "side border" that forces a larger page width and not actual content. Scroll it to the middle and see for yourself.

2. It is impossible to tell what is a link anymore, without putting your mouse over everything, because the links are not underlined anymore (whether or not your mouse is over them). It's hard to remember which ones were underlined on the old version, but however it was it worked really well. Although if your monitor is really bright, you might be able to distinguish between black and sea green (the links are sea green). I guess we're all just supposed to be glad that we're not colorblind and have to deal with things like that all the time. Well, everyone besides the people who actually do have vision problems and the new website just makes it worse.

3. You have to click the "Search" link at the top right to bring out the search box, which is just hiding there below the link and nothing else is in its space. Was someone just having fun with the cool new javascript they learned or what? Until now I thought it was just a regular link to a separate search page, which would admittedly be even worse once you finally figure out how to make the "oh so magic!" box appear. This goes into number 4...



4. Seriously. Is the new website supposed to be a game where the fun is figuring out how to navigate it, or are we supposed to be able to do useful things with it right away?



5. I definitely have to agree with this (no joke intended).

Now, it might not be so bad if they got rid of the empty side borders, and let people choose from different colors, and let people change what widgets are alongside the left of each page. I am hoping they will at least do that much and not let it just be typical LL not caring about people who actually have to use stuff on a daily basis. Although if their goal was to make things faster and more accessible to more people, and they actually think they succeeded, then I guess things are just getting worse as usual. We all love SL, so please take steps to fix this and don't just ignore all the harsh criticism.

It's the same ones who told them only 2-4% of the residents will be affected by Adult Content Policy.

Isn't this what they hired that Big Spaceship outfit to do? Redeisgn the webpage to "enhance the new user experience" (tm) ?

Wonder how much they paid for it.

The screen resolution is really irrelevant once you ask where it's written that you have to run your browser in full screen mode. Suppose I want the browser taking up half the screen width and SL taking up the other half?

I always choose fluid width layouts when I can. The only time I'll do fixed width is if a client picks out a stock fixed-width layout and doesn't want to pay for me to change it. Or for subsections where graphic considerations require it.

It's layout is heaps better to use, much easier for me, the colours are all corporate and business like which I agree with the others here, doesn't look as good.

hmm didn't realize that xstreet was actually defaulting to larger that 1024.... in that case it's just the opposite stupidity as the main site.... it isn't that hard to make a css page that will fit either 4:3 or 8:5 formats nicely... pure laziness.

So the majority of people, who use 1024x768 will have a scroll bar at the bottom as i do? How bizzare they'd force this on everyone when it obviously hasnt been tested properly.. My gf is a web designer and she tests sites in all resolutions before submitting them. Mind you, we are talking LL here. Shoddy at best.

You know, the way this thread has gone makes me think that these two fellas were actually critiquing the new site

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpYEJx7PkWE

I actually like the new site; and for me the fact that I have to login again on xstreet is for first time welcome: when i try to click on merchant menus it gives me an error here at work; I have to open xstreet on another tab

I only wish we could send IMs through the website to our friends online...

Too much, that's how much.

I asked one of my friends who doesn't use SL her opinion for the "wall of screens," that is the non-user main page. Her first word was "distracting." Which oddly enough does describe the first hour in SL, but I don't think LL wanted to have their website advertise that.

So, now they have to make the rest of the website just as distracting and annoying as the non-user main page. I'm surprised they didn't have a "wall of screen" for our dashboard. I think the only thing that stopped them was that they didn't want to hire Big Spaceship again.

Nah, that fits on the page properly lol.

I'm sure it'll be good when it's finished.

Yes true, Lexxi, it does look blog like and I do believe that they are heading in this direction (if what I heard is true). We will be able to customize these pages to some extent. You may be able to customize colours, fonts and content...much like you would your Yahoo/Google landing pages. Many of the comments here in the Forums concerning the new design scheme demonstrate how different our ideas are in what we'd like to see.

However, I have not seen any confirmation from LL on IF or when and to what extent we can change these pages.

Z

LOL Those guys are funny, and yup, sure does sound like the critiques here.

Oh, I hate the yahoo page. I only use it for e-mail. They keep changing the format on me. I also hate the hover boxes. I try to click on the e-mail link and I get a hover box telling me what it is. I know what it is, moronic web designer. I used to glance at whatever news they had in the middle as I clicked on the link. I got the gist as I moved the mouse and as the page came up. Now I can't do that because of the pop-up (hover box, whatever that is called), blocking the middle section.

Back to SL page. I finally figured out that if I used the "manage" link below friends, I got the friends list. Something that looks closer to the old "which friends are online now" page that used to be there. Closer than the current mess.