Talk:Mock main page

Please leave me some feedback on the redesign I'm assembling, or make your own changes or fixes to it (or to any of the pages it links to, some of which still need serious work). Keep in mind that this page is still a prototype, with much more work to be done.

--Ethereal Cereal 22:50, 28 May 2006 (PDT)

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It's looking a bit chunky, but I like it.

I mean, it's meatier the its previous incarnation, but you get quicker access to the more interesting information.

My only real comment for the moment is that the site information section could be split off from the UFO table. It relates more to the site as a whole than to the UFO section in general.

- NKF

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Okay, I split it off, good point.

I added in the other titles and made the formatting "less chunky". I'm willing to call the redesign done at this point. I'll leave it here for about a week before I copy it to the Main Page, barring opposition.

--Ethereal Cereal 11:52, 1 June 2006 (PDT)

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I said the proof is in the pudding... and I like it a lot! In fact I'm already using it and seeing things I hadn't noticed before. I say let's go for it.

NKF, you may be scratching your head, because I wanted less menu entries with the old main page, not more. But that was when it was one column, and space was at a premium. With so much more room, a lot can be put there... and it's great to get right to good stuff.

Sure, it will be able to use some tweaking... but more because the site is still disorganized in places. For example, Research Tips is like a lite version of Research, because it was made before Research was. Things like Grenades combined or made into a primary entry with secondaries or something.

I was going to suggest the left alignment... centering wasn't working, with the indented secondary headings.

What happened to the "Game File Analysis" section?

I say let's do it.

Do you think the current main page might be retired to an "old main page", at least for a little while. That way we can find things we know are somewhere, if we can't seem to find them with the new page. There could be a tiny link at the bottom of the new main page saying "click here to access the previous version of the main page".

THANKS for taking the time to put that together!!

---MikeTheRed 19:12, 2 June 2006 (PDT)

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Yeah, a number of individual articles still need some reworking, but I think most of the major ones are in pretty good shape now. The Equipment and Alien pages need to be standardized a bit. A few topics are still underserviced -- mostly tactical and strategic pages, which are hard to write with authority.

The HTML was pretty mangled before. I hadn't even realized because I was using Firefox, and Firefox apparently disregarded the center-align instruction. I'm glad I thought to load it up in IE.

Note to NKF: the 'small' tag doesn't display all that well in either IE or Firefox, and they both render it differently. Better to stick to italics, I think.

Game File Analysis is a subsection of the Under the Hood page -- I added a link to it from Saved Game Files, which is directly linked on the new main page.

The archive link can be as simple as this: http://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Main_Page&oldid=6364

You're welcome. I think the site is increasingly living up to its promise. Now I want to spider it so I don't have to be online to access it while I'm playing X-COM. :-)

Shameless plug: did you notice I found the correct Psionics formula? Haven't researched the distance portion of it yet, though.

--Ethereal Cereal 20:58, 2 June 2006 (PDT)

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Good point about a link for the old main page.

Erm... what's a spider? Saving for off-line viewing? I use IE, if it matters.

The Psi formula? Gadzooks! See my comments on its Discussion page

---MikeTheRed 22:15, 2 June 2006 (PDT)

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A spider is a program which "crawls" a website, downloading its pages. Search engines use them to index pages; they can also be used to copy a site's content.

--Ethereal Cereal 10:55, 3 June 2006 (PDT)

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Well, I thought that boxes would be placed horizontally and without text links to the right side. Only boxes, all in the same gray-blue, gray-brown palette. Also, I wanted to place these pictures to the background of every main table, but they have to be much lighter to allow the text be visible. It could be 3 large boxes in a row (with x-com 1-3) and in the second row there are smaller boxes with other games. No time at all to draw this, sorry! --ufo.mesh 10:33, 26 October 2010 (BST)