Community Website

Some of you may have seen me mention that we're working on updating/upgrading the rest of the website, which we're thinking of as the "Community" part of the site. I wanted to give you some idea of the structure, and get your thoughts on what you'd like to see in terms of content.

The update will involve redesigning and re-organizing a lot of the info that's already on the site. Rather than use drop down menus the way we're currently set up, each main section, highlighted on the bar across the top of the page, will have a landing page. Additionally there will be a left side navigation options where sub-pages will appear for the section you're currently browsing.

Following is a list of these main navigational (top level) pages, and the associated sub-pages. On the top level pages the content can vary. We can highlight new projects under news, for example, or showcase a new continent that's coming online under Land.

In addition to changing the navigation and design, the site will include a few new features such as the Linden blogs, a wiki (for everyone to use), and dynamically generated land and economic stats (currently uploaded into this forum weekly by Philip).

If you have ideas for content or information you'd like to see, either on the top level pages or added as sub-pages, please post it here. Some will make it into this update; ideas involving new functionality beyond what's listed here may be held to the next phase (due early 2005).

The main pages will be:
- Community
- information such as leaderboards, land and economic stats, friends online
- links to fan sites, special programs such as Partner sign-ups and Resident referrals, volunteer group applications (e.g. Live Help) and forums

News
- Linden blogs, New World Notes, Press, interviews, etc.

Land
- Auctions, Island info, Land pricing, FAQ

Downloads
- Templates, textures, Client, starter guide

Support
- Wiki, script library, starter guide

The Account section will be a persistent link from the top of each page.

I think that sounds great.

I'll be interested in hearing other peoples' reactions--

but also, I have to say, thank you for running that by us; while you don't HAVE to by any means run your ideas by the community, you do. What other company would do that? It's nice to know that there's some level of mutual respect or acknowledgment between the company<>players.

This isn't regarding content possibilities, but could you get the naviagation bar thing we have up top in the main www.secondlife.com site again? The present site as it is simply is NOT attractive. Sure, it's pretty, but it's contentless. If I point a link at the site as a reference, they really can't see WHAT SL is about. The present categories of Create, Personalize, yadda yadda doesn't exactly scream information, and it's not intuitive what clicking something will get me. I have to click all the links to find out what each one is, and each link doesn't have much info anyway.

I think I miss the "About" category the most, so I don't have to write for thirty minutes for each time I try to make a referal, explaining what SL is.

I agree with Moleculor, allow new users to access the other information on the website somehow, when I was first looking at SL it was interisting to see everything and get lots of info on what was going on *before* I signed up, to see what SL was really like. Currently, having to sign in to see all this, is annoying. I suggest a link added to the current front page saying "More Info" or some such.

Question about the Wiki, what kind of Wiki is this going to be? A "general" help Wiki? SL needs and easily accessable one of those. If it takes off I would also suggest adding alink to this in the GUI.

How about letting us be able to send IM's to our online friends from the website? You could have a "Offline IM's" page that allows users to review IM's sent to them, kinda like a webmail thing, or, just have it so you can send an IM and the reply's go to your inbox, or, reply's go to your forum PM's (this would be confusing though). Reply's going to inbox would probably be good.

Will the Map still be around? If so it'd be good if the website map was updated when the worldmap was.

Thats all I can think of right now. The rest of the ideas sound great!

And yes thank you for taking our input on this!

Any chance LL could stop spending oodles of time designing and redesigning the web site and concentrate 100% on sorting out the instability in your hardware and network and the numerous crippling bugs in-world? There doesn't appear to be any pressing need for you to spend time changing the web site again, yet the in-world problems are very pressing indeed. Sort the core out then work on the fancy bits.

Just a thought...

Seconded.

Here's an example of how your present layout is hard to navigate.

Personally, I liked the old layout best. The one with Echo Omega's giant head? Yeah. That always seemed simplest. Just revert to that, and get back to focusing on releasing many small patches to patch the bugs in SL. (NOT another GIANT bugfix, because you know how badly the LAST giant bug fix went.)

Thanks for your ideas!

The team working on the website is not the team that's working on the code for Second Life. If they weren't working on the website they'd most likely be developing tools for internal use, creating ads, or maybe designing t-shirts.

We have made addressing the performance issues our top priority. Philip talked about our plans last night in his blog: Philip Lindens Blog. Cory will be adding more specific information about upgrades to the system and performance improvements in his blog later today: Prompt Criticality. If you have ideas or concerns you'd like to make them aware of, please feel free to respond to their entries.

To answer your question about the wiki: its purpose will be as a repository for all the knowledge everyone has about Second Life, and will be accessible for both editing and reading, to all SL residents. We should be able to include a link in the GUI -- I'll check on that.

Thanks again.

Robin, there is something I have been wanting to see on the SL website since I came over here from There.com: a listing of items for sale in SL, with a thumbnail pic and a bit of info.

I know that this type of listing might take up a good bit of resources, and I don't even know if it would be possible to do. But the most intuitive way I could imagine to integrate this would be if someone who puts out a new item for sale in SL could have a check-box in-world that would give them the choice to list that item for sale on the SL "merchant site" for a small fee. It would also be optimal if the site could be searched by item type, keyword/name, and price. It is probably a safe bet that, if you find a good price point, merchants wouldn't list every single item they have for sale at any given time, only those they think might bring in customers. You could even put a limit of 10 or 20 or so items that one merchant could list (say for a span of a week).

I know that you probably want to encourage "active" (in-world) shopping in SL, and not necessarily "passive shopping." However, I think a site like this would go a long way toward allowing merchants another good way to gain exposure for their goods. Also, it would provide those people stuck at work something to do besides browse and post to the forums all day long. And, I suspect it would encourage MORE in-world shopping because people would be better informed as to what's available for sale in SL.

Let's face it, a lot of what's going on in SL every day is shopping. A Linden-run site dedicated to featuring what's for sale in SL seems like a natural thing, to me.