Redesigned Second Life Homepage for new visitors going Live

Sorry hon, I apologize for getting baited into my own short rant. Like you point out, it's a done deal.

Nah. It's marketing, designed to catch the interest of someone who is statistically unlikely to give it more than 10 seconds before leaving. Only you represent you, not some corporate web page. Linden Lab doesn't speak for you or me, only for themselves.

That's the point, though. Some of us aren't self appointed. We are, in fact, experts in our field and appointed by our employers to be experts. We're just lending that expertise for free. Unfortunately, LL seems to have selective hearing.

I would add:
Innovate
Gratify
Amaze
Give

Seasonal Greetings to everyone....

No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no...

Gods and their pet demons, if I run into another store with a damned "copybot protector" my little fuzzy head will explode and get prim brains all over the place.

Thanks so much for the all the comments! I wanted to respond to some of the more technical questions regarding the homepage, as well as to some of the great suggestions I've seen.

@Cognitive Gears- Appreciate the note on you received for not having Flash. We do have an automatic detection that should give you the non-Flash homepage when the proper version of Flash is not installed. I'll double check with the team that this is not the case.

@Alisha Matova- Thanks for the question on the slider. I believe the way you describe the interaction, that it is indeed working correctly for you. The slider is meant to rotate through the pods from left to right, similar to if you place your mouse to the right or left of the browser- the screen should auto-rotate the same way.

@Raudf Fox- Great observation about the shock going from a black homepage into a white registration. We discussed the trade-off of waiting for a complete integration vs. not and sided on the go ahead for now. Its temporary and as part of our continued work, we do plan to address this design issue as soon as possible. More to come!

@Koinup Burt- Very thoughtful comment on other "verbs". This type of constructive feedback is something we can take right into design and testing!

@JoyD Turbo- Also another great suggestion regarding the use of "socialize" instead of "flirt". We'll be sure to test that as well!

Again- thanks to everyone for the comments and happy holidays!
Cheers!
Jaime Linden

You know I'm not a fan of flash pages... so I'm not going to say I like the page... but is it really out of the realm of possibility that some people do? Assuming that everyone who disagrees with you is a shill is counterproductive.

One possible bug: when I was clicking around looking at pods, sometimes just clicking on a pod would send me to the "join" page, but only when I had my mouse over by the right side and it was actually scrolling.

Thanks Jaime.

If I take the slider an push it far to the left, the page wooshes past a light speed. Not a biggy, but maybe there is a way to slow it down on the extreme edge cases.

Happy Holidays everyone!

I agree about the scroll bar needing a hard stop. I actually made myself completely dizzy (hard to do) with that thing spinning so easily. I have a friend who is easily motion sick and I couldn't get her near this site with that problem.

Katt: Might I suggest that if you can't go ahead and fix the sign-up section, then tone the background down to a dark gray on the main page and sign up page? It will make the transition a little less abrupt and buy you time to actually get other things fixed.

The only reason I thought of that was because of a lecture my husband told me about in his web-design class when he was in college. One of his classmates only finished the front page and had a different style for the rest of the page. The prof said it looked amateur and unfinished and that it's better to keep everything at the same level of finished, rather than one part completely done and the rest at next to not started.

I will address this. When Journey Island first appeared in Showcase, we [the sim designers, owners and managers] were not told it would be featured, did not submit any photos and would certainly have had imgaes of the content and not me featured solo. A group shot of all the staff and designers would have been preferred or even a shot of the band avatars [yes they do have SL avatars and have come in world] Now fast forward, to see that Showcase photo and read the comments suggesting that my avatar was featured as a flaunting of the "come have a hawt date in SL woohoo" made me cringe on many levels and I am thankful it is not being used but stress that at no time were any of we content creators of Journey Island consulted about this, period. OTOH, the new photo featuring the Island was taken without our ok too. In fact we [the island staff] came upon it being done, but that's another story. Anyway I hope this helps clarify the issue and Merry Happy Holidays to all. Carry on. IMO BS should come into SL and at the very least VISIT the places they are featuring. As a web designer and graphic artist, I submit they would need to do this to represent the experience correctly. When you design outside the box you might miss the whole point.

Oh and can we please knock off the knocker commments.

I still say this:


http://www.flickr.com/photos/28058818@N08/3126613308/sizes/l/


Is better. But I'm bias.

It doesn't seem as though LL will re-adress the obvious design flaw with their page (in that its rubbish), so it may well be a moot point now. I just think it's a travesty that LL are wasting our money on companies that clearly know nothing about Second Life. But then PR-people will always be PR people. They don't think with their heads, just their pocket calculators. Extremely foolhardy indeed not to use the resources at your disposal when you're not making a lot of money because nobody is signing up.

*tannoy bing bong* A picture of tinies needed on Page one please. Tinies to the homepage.

I'll have a Linden acknowledge me yet.

Why not use "Get Laid" instead of "Flirt" as that is pretty much the idea.

My score ranges fom Meh to Fail. It just doesn't do anything to make me want to go beyond it.

Not just tinies. What about other animals? Dragons, Aliens, Tigers, robotic AV's, mermaids, a whole plethora of things has missed out. Instead LL has chosen to go for cutesy AV's that might attract some interest....

....err....that's not fulfilling the brief, Big Spacechip! You're trying to bring people INTO the product, not sell it! REVERSE STRATEGY!

I'm just happy to see my wifes magnificent Rack featured even if it was short lived LOL!

Well, all of my previous feedback applies, (might want to recheck the initial posts - at least a few people have already suggested to change Flirt to Socialize!)

Anyway, the live site isn't quite as bad as I thought, though it's still too dark compared to other pages and overstuffed with visuals and not enough actual info. I know, I know...you're trying to get as many new people to sign up with this jazzed up page as possible, but you may be leaving others behind...especially people interested in the creative side of SL - the new page is highly slanted to the "virtual dating" crowd.

After looking a second time, I realize that if you click on the pix that don't have a "verb" you actually get an enlarged pix with a nice and more informative caption. For example, if you click on the little robot pix, you get the caption "Expect the Unexpected. You never know what you will stumble upon in Second Life" - well, that's pretty good - why bury it?

So, a new suggestion - make those captions appear on mouseover instead of having to click on the pix OR show the shorter caption imbedded in the pix and click for the longer sentence.

I'm skeptical that you'll listen to your current residents on any of this, but hope dies hard.

Happy Holidays!

How does one tell the difference of new users signing up a month ago, using the old page, versus the one's using the new page now? They are signing up to sign up, regardless of the page used to do it. Plus, there is no button that says "Click here for HTML version".

"Test results show the new page performed well"

How can they show that, if it is harder to find and access the old HTML website? You have virtually no point of reference to claim that it performed well (or better) if equal access was not provided fairly. Which it is clearly not, because there is no button on the page that asks or directs one to the HTML website.

"Over the past week we’ve been comparing the core metrics (traffic, registrations, logins, economic and inworld activity) of the new page with our existing new user home page"

Again, I ask, how can they show that, if equal access to both versions are not available? (I've yet to see a button that would direct me to an HTML version of anything). Plus, as I originally stated, how does one tell the difference between users a month ago, and users now? Most of them are only given one option, skewing any potential results.

"so we have provided an alternate, non-Flash experience for them."

...Where? I was unable to find any of it on different computers, all of it leads to the same Flash webpages, regardless if it can load or not.

"In the next two weeks, we will keep a close eye on the metrics to make sure that the page is performing as we expect"

Same as first two.

I believe they could deliver one page to one new user, and a different page to the next new user, for testing purposes, thus giving them current info on how the different pages affected the then current stream of new users reaching the url.

They also have old records to refer to.

You could always vote on it. Whose do you prefer, mine or the black one?

But as someone said. I doubt LL will listen to current residents. Current residents are current - not new. They don't give a rats ass about people all ready paying - they just want new people to START paying. They care not for anything else.

I'll send you the "Copybot Protector Eliminator", which frighten away Copybot Protectors with a constant stream of chat, particle displays, sounds, and frequent changes to your camera.

I was responding to Jessica, who wondered how they can compare the results from the two pages. I think during the test phase, one person going to secondlife.com got one page, and another person going there got a different page. I think that's done all the time to test the effects of different page designs. So how they could compare the two pages is not a mystery at all.

They did a test; assuming they did a valid test, how can you argue with results? What difference does it make if people who've already signed up don't like the new user's page?

There will be already registered folks that get the new user's page because they log out or don't use cookies or clear them out a lot. That's their choice, they have to look briefly at a page they don't like before clicking on the link that takes them to where they want to go, or, they (we, that is) can make bookmarks. I never stop by secondlife.com on the way to the forums, jira, or the wiki. If I checked my account very often I'd bookmark that.

Yeah, but like i said. The 'numbers' from their 'test' aren't new residents coming to check out SL. It's us checking out how rubbish the page is. So the whole test is pointless.

Ever since the new webpage rollout, I have had trouble with the exsisting webpages. Very slow loading or not loading at all, Is anyone else having this problem? If this is what I have to deal with for the apparently unpopular new webpages, I hate it.

Color scheme is nice.

WAY too many pictures. It is way too busy and if you are not going to install a hard stop to the scrolling sideways bit, slow it down considerably.

Sometimes less is more.. this is one of those cases.