Redesigned Second Life Homepage for new visitors going Live

While I do enjoy the new design where is the Buy Linden button, did I somehow miss it? If it is not there, could it be worked into the design? I know you can purchase lindens in world, but there are times when I do use the actual web site and having that right on the Home Page is a plus IMO.

Then there is the dilemma.. assuming after seeing version A they actually want to come back...
First rule of Advertising.. You have 15 seconds to capture the viewer, 10 seconds if the page is still loading.. 0 seconds if you use a format thay don't have, or blocked....

I noticed Cookies have been altered.. despite the assurances it is for newcomers, I keep being reset to noobie status and redirected to the stupid page.

Well you aren't and you did based on the old design... so whats the secret? Nothing.. they are doing as they always do, fixing things that aren't broken....

Ah, but Bigspaceship aren't advertising it; they don't advertise anything. They rely on other folk to direct traffic to the websites they have done, and then enhance the product. To be honest, I don't really know what they are doing with the homepage, other than fucking it up.

But I take your point, they're formatting it for people like folk who have all the applications they ever need all up-to-date and installed correctly on their machine and top-notch connection speeds. Probably about 1% of the internet using population. Like the folk at Linden Lab.

Well. At least the website will be consistent with SL itself. Newbies will get the experience of Lag, things broken, having to install loads of new drivers to make it run properly. A true Second Life experience even before registration!

The new webpage is for people who are new/not logged in. Once you are logged in you see the information you need.

When you put it that way, it's obvious: Big Spaceship is manned by evil geniuses! They deliver unto sign-up an internet demographic already screened for SL-tolerance. This has great potential. I wonder if they could embed a subliminal cue that drives away anyone inconveniently disinclined to be a victim of fraud; then our futures will be secure.

If the goal is simply to get people to sign up, the words "register to get free porn." would probably be more effective than either the old or new pages.

I have no issue with the new page except it seems a trivial change.

The issue you should have, I would think, is that the blog posts talk about Business and Education, but everything in the visual language of the page says social and leisure.

SL has Business and Education potential that could grow to match its Leisure use, but you need to target that marketing a little better.

Regardless of the metrics you used, I doubt this layout is going to help toward this end.

I'm afraid LL might be more focused on #'s than on residents who stick around long-term... I could be wrong - maybe a Linden could address the projects they're working on that are aimed at premium accounts and customer loyalty/longevity. For instance, what's going on with T Linden's call for ideas on improving premium membership? T Linden's last post in that thread was on 11/26/08 and he was still saying there's no timeframe on any changes and look for more info "in the coming months."

I think residents would really appreciate something good and positive from LL in early 2009 - a nice "Happy New Year" improvement or two. Fixing the problem with slow texture loading in the viewer would be helpful, too. More black, cluttered, low-info web pages are not gonna do it for me

I like the idea of showcasing more variety on the frontpage.
Agreed though there needs to be a more visible link to a non flash version.
Also, it is too dark with the black frame, not as welcoming as the previous design.
(could be personal taste though, but my eyes hurt from so much black, and it is harder for me to read white on black than the other way round).
If it would be possible with a blue frame, like it was before, and the whole pictures into the place where previously the pictures were on the homepage , that would be great.
Join and download buttons could be (even) bigger. Great that now the "free download" is more visible. That was an issue before.
I have rebuilt our store and land many times now, and the best decision so far was to make changes slowly and keep track on results instead of changing things too much. That could lead to disorientation. Think of those fans that describe on their website step by step, maybe even with pictures, how to register with Second Life, or where to find which information. Have to write alot new now, once they find the website has changed.
I can understand it is difficult to make the page more appealing without changing the look and feel totally. What I would really wish for is the black to disappear, that makes really a rather threatening impression. Like a war game look or something. Please consider this. The speciality of SL is rather the opportunities to be creative. I made some investigation and put together some color theory results in the hope they will be useful:

Red symbolizes: action, confidence, courage, vitality

Pink symbolizes: love, beauty

Brown symbolizes: earth, order, convention

Orange symbolizes: vitality with endurance

Gold symbolizes: Wealth, prosperity, wisdom

Yellow symbolizes: wisdom, joy, happiness, intellectual energy

Green symbolizes: life, nature, fertility, well being

Blue symbolizes: youth, spirituality, truth, peace

Purple symbolizes: Royalty, magic, mystery


Indigo symbolizes: intuition, meditation, deep contemplation


White symbolizes: Purity, Cleanliness


Black symbolizes: Death, earth, stability


Gray symbolizes: Sorrow, security, maturity

So while black might symbolize stability, i would not use it because of the other associations. This also shows why blue and yellow reflect perfectly what Second Life is about.

Thank you for considering this.

Hi Katt,

Thank you for sharing this with us. I hope that my opinion matters and is not interpreted as negative but I wish to comment. Thanks for listening.

The decision to go with Big Space ship is a bad one. I have reviewed their site and all I see is gobs of flashy and fluffy pages. Web design is about communication and not a college art project which is the artsy direction Big Space tends to take. As soon as I land on a site that begins to load flash I immediately backspace away never to view whatever lies beyond. It says to me "we want to snazz you up" and not "we want to communicate". It reflects to me how the company who owns such a site considers me with regards to our future relationship. Instead of warm fuzzy greeting and bridge building I feel instead like I am parring with a used car salesman.

So please no flash.

During his monologue on Ted.com J.J. Abrams spoke at length about a "mystery box" full of magic trick items he purchased as a child with his grandfather. His Grandfather died that same week and J.J. Abrams never opened the box. That mysterious talisman is now the source of his writing and his success. To this day he does not know the contents of said box. But his imagination teems with possibilties when he considers "What is inside the box?". It is this mystery in his shows that drives you to look deeper and to stay tuned and to be a part of the adventure.

When I joined Second Life the web page revealed such tidbits as "Second life is a world created by its inhabitants" and hinted at a new untamed frontier for exploring. While perhaps encumbersome The page evoked enough curiosity to lead me in the door which btw I am very thankful it did.

The new page is lacking information, it evokes no mystery nor wonder and humorously as pointed out before looks like someones Flickr page. I am not drawn in by it nor do I even wish to remain at this site and I feel that is a loss, a very sad foreclosure which cheats the new comer out of what is a wonderful experience.

If you truly wish to capture newcomers who will become valuable components of our wonderful environment then please do away with this flashy hype and replace it with true human interest stories. Inform them how the community comes together each year to raise money for charities and how real people find real love and friendship in this wonderful world. Expose the newcomers to residents who through hard work and labor have made very real businesses and learned about their own potentials that were previously unknown. Take them on tours of the many universities and cultural centers who are reaching out through your innovative media to expose new people to their ideologies. Show them the many inventors, architects and dreamers who use this platform to design real world concepts. And yes invite them to shop and have fun.

Whet their appetite for discovery and help them find through us a need in themselves that yearns to be expressed and I promise you the bridge you build with the newcomers will last a life time.

Thank you Katt for reading this and allowing me to share!

Cheewha Palen

well, to add in my 2L$ to the discussion:

overall, i think the new page design isnt bad, but it should indeed be more self-explaining and get some usability improvements:

- if possible, automatically display the html alternative. if the user doesnt have flash, they should have the following experience: "oh hey, you dont have flash, well show you a html version until you install it, but it works all the same" - instead of "hey you dont have flash. install it please, or find the link that leads you to the html page" - which will make people lose interest fast, and give the appearance of a broken design

- the slider should indeed indicate position, not speed. speed should depend on proximity to mouse to screen edge, or to slider dragging speed

outside of that, there are some great points from other users, which id only be repeating. though id like to see a bit more of a spectrum spread in those pictures. as in, beginners avs are shown, id like to see some really high-grade ones too, with a notion of what people can become. many think that SL is all about ruths, and itd be good to supply quality footage to show people what things start out as, but also what they can become.
furs were also mentioned. they are a huge demographic, and they could do with some representation. also any other subcultures really, its good to display that anyone can be anything, anytime

I am biased, but so are the other commenters, so I'll just say I don't like the new page. It does nothing for me (can't stand flash), but then people like me are not who you want to target, so I will try to comment on those two market segments: the newbie entering prepackaged experiences, and business/corporate users.

First, I want to thank you that once logged in and cookie stashed away, going to secondlife.com redirects away from that flashie page to the nice static emtry page that we experienced folks prefer.

The newbie doesn't have a clue what that front page means. I don't understand why after going through the effort to use Flash, with the cutesy expanding focus mini-windows, why upon hovering over one, there is no text tag explaining what the nondescript picture represents. Instead, they have to click on a picture to get that experience. And then it goes modal, requiring a bit of futzing to find out to break out that mode, you have to go back and wiggle the selector on the bottom of the page. These are newbies, too confusing.

BTW, the next level in is nice for newbies with its preselected set of avies.
[added]
You ought to provide a tie-in to the community portals at this point. If someone clicks on an icon/picture of some prepackaged experience and then begins to build an avie, at the end they should be sent to the community gateway associated with the experience depicted in the icon/picture.

When corporate folks see the front page, their first impression is "this is a game", or "this will be a distracrtion". It looks unprofessional and it does not clearly indicate the business options for, say, virtual meeting rooms, shared collaboration environments. The corporate user runs with IT admin normalized equipment in which Flash is often excluded, less so because of security concerns, but more so because of the destabilizaing effects of that massive plug-in. The corporate user enters this WEB site with equipment designed for business purposes, weak 3-D, and if on the road, often through their cellphone connection. Having the massive bandwidth requirement of this new entry page is a big deterrent to them.

I'd start it simple, a nice big pretty single artist drawn page with three big buttons:
[Business, New-Experiences, Get-Started]

You need to not turn off the corporate/business segment with the "Shop, Dance, Play, etc" banners.

If you want to follow a company that has a decent balance between gamers, content creators, and business users, and with a nice user interface (for the particular market segments) take a look at both Apple and Microsoft.

The scroll bar/ slider on the bottom needs to be fixed. It keeps snapping to the middle. I understand why you'd want to do that, but you shouldn't change the functionality of commonly used interface items. If you want that functionality to move from right to left or left to right in a looping carousel put arrow buttons or something on the bottom. Scroll bars should scroll and show your place in the line up.

After playing with it, I think that content-wise it's 100% better than the old homepage.

I'm sorry how much did you pay these guys?

They told you that this new front page would be "acessible"...im sorry, you just wasted your money. The next door neighbour has an onscreen reader and webtv...the new front page is horribly bloated and the onscreen reader DOES NOT work on this new site.

Pretty sockwave flash i'll give ya that...but thats all it is...pretty.

You could have spent the money on fixing the bug ridden mess thats called the viewer...but nooooooooo....pretty flash....thats what the residents want...LMAO

I didnt have time to read all the thread so forgive my ignorance if I am totally off the mark here. If this page s supposed to project creativity, and professioanlism and all the other jazz, it is not hitting the mark at all.

I am sorry but it looks to me like a collage of random pics, indeed some are not even really interesting. And then couple that with the fact that I have no idea what is in store for me. As a resident hopeful I am not sure i would be very drawn to clicking on too many of them. I mean i am sorry but it is like a simple flash app with a bunch of pictures and links mapped to it yes? a few links at the top, download, login, etc.

Wheres the beef? simple is good, but geez, gimmie a clue what I'm supposed to be drawn in by. maybe fewer pics, with a better theme organization or something, and clearly defined categories in some way, borders, picture color tone, i don't know, something.

It is just to mish mash for my tastes. It looks like something i might make cuz i tend to be lazy and rely ona flash app or premade template thing to pick up the slack from my total lack of html programming knowledge. But I would really think LL could afford a bit more creativity and inventiveness when it comes to their homepage.

That new homepage was a disaster. Offered no information, behaved strangely with the mouse, and required scrolling past all those useless images to get to the rest of the menu. Sorry, Linden Labs, but quite frankly...worst homepage ever.

On the positive side, it appears to be gone now. Thank the web-gods for small miracles.

Is it just me or have signups actually dropped in Dec to about 11k/day from about 14k/day in Nov after that massive 40k+/day peak in Oct... any update on your numbers Katt?

It's still there. You are probably logged in.

=========

I wonder if the pages for other virtual worlds such as Active Words, Hipihi, etc. will change to resemble secondlife.com.

=========

http://www.kaneva.com/

http://www.there.com/

Seems like they had the right idea before second life did, albeit a bit more homespun.

overall i love the idea, the effort and the layout.

however, it needs focus and clearly defined categories... and a more defined audience. the categories "Flirt", "Dance" and "Play" seems targeted towards youth :/ i would make categories like BUY, CREATE, SELL, MEET, EXPLORE. and use better photos! there are so many good SL photographers on flickr. you guys could make a group in which ppl aggree to allow use of their photos by posting in the group pool. these pics seem dated.

Or pull in images from snapzilla.

I would like to thank Linden Lab for doing exactly what they wanted, no matter what the FEEDBACK said, that's the same FEEDBACK that Linden Lab asked for, Linden Lab went ahead and put up a POS Website.

I would like to once again, ask Katt to provide NUMBERS showing WHY this design was kept. Linden Lab employee's speak of how the testing numbers showed the New Residents really liked this new site design, so please, share with the Community these "numbers".

Knowing you won't, I just want to go on record saying, while Linden Lab claims to have "OPEN and TRANSPARENT" Communication, Linden Lab couldn't be further from that statement. You want to be TRANSPARENT at the Lab, then please show me I'm wrong here, show us the NUMBERS.

Just like the NUMBERS of SIMs declined in November by over 2500 and over 1600 by Mid-December, they were pulled off the website, claiming that they were "wrongly shown" and have yet to been put back up. When the NUMBERS prove Linden Lab made a HORRIBLE MISTAKE, they pull them, so the Community can't see the truth; TRANSPARENT, me thinks not! Now, as before, Linden Lab refuses to share these NUMBERS, most likely because they prove exactly what everyone else has said, that this new website design is a POS and should be scrapped.

Open and Transparent sure does seem to mean something different for the Lab then it does for the Community!

I had not read about the new login page so was quite shocked when I logged in and there it was. A few thoughts.

1. Is this where our monthly fee is going? Certainly I don't anything inworld is changing for the better.

2. How were the pics, places and avatars picked? I would have liked to submit my land to be included, sure lots of others feel the same.

3. Is this money well spent. Personally I think people are leaving and not coming. Do you honestly think newbies are going to even understand something like this?

4. Why not offer the project to designers who are members? So many are very creative and well respected in their field.

Overall I liked it but I know the place after all these years. I did not like the scroll.

Jaca