Dear Lara and Chris

[Maneatingcow]

I've been reading this site since almost launch day. I've enjoyed it a great deal. For the past, I thank you.

But I'll be perfectly honest. I think the new layout is poor. I actually yelled "what the F#CK did Chris DO!?" when I saw it. Here is why.

#1 - Hard to find reviews: Before when you visited pcgr - along the top of the page was a letter. And under that ;atter was the names of games starting with that letter. Games were also divided into categories along the top. It really doesn't get much simpler than that.

You essentially created a almost perfect design at the beginning. The "urge" to redesign a page after so many years is normal, but a lot of pages do this, and it goes for the worse because their original ideas were simply too good. A good analogy of this is with rock n roll bands. Many big name rock bands have their best ideas at the beginning of their careers - such as Deep Purple, Boston, Van Halen, Brian Johnson era AC/DC, Guns N Roses, Dio, and so on. Same thing applies here.

#2 - Too much "Shop here" font: Ok, if you want to push this - that's fine. You can even add it in the reviews like you did before. But bring back the #1 reason I listed. Having reviews under only categories get's trickey for action/adventure games when people go" ok, which category is it under?"

#3 - Narrow page: At leas ton my PC. About 5 inches of the entire right side of my monitor is bare. Just empty space that could be better utilized. Push the adds over, put "hot reviews" back there and put the letters across for quicker access to reviews. Yeah, just like before.

I know of several web pages that have changed layout, I asked to "change it back" and they never did. I think it's a pride thing - like what the webmaster did recently HAS to be better or something, I'm not sure. You had it right with the last design in terms of ease to navigate to reviews. Listing by letter of publisher is not nearly as effective - not everyone knows the publisher of a game.

#4 - pcgr and videogamereview all the same site. Stupid. I liked when the sites were seperate, and hot reviews for PC and consoles and everything was seperate.

Hopefully my comments are useful and not just taken in stride. Let's see what's in store.

[JMix]

I concur...
...well stated.

[Richard Hobbes]

Maneatingcow,

While I agree with everything you wrote, here is my understanding of the situation. (Lara or Chris, please step in here anytime if I'm wrong.) PCGR and VGR were combined together because they are part of a much bigger picture - about a dozen sites (all owned by parent company E-Centives) on different topics from golf, to stereos, to video games. It did not make sense to maintain two sites on video games when, in the bigger picture, both sites are really about the same topic. Likewise, with the exception of PCGR and VGR, all the other sites used a common layout and behind-the-scenes-technology. To have PCGR and VGR using a different layout and different technology meant a lot more work and expense. Thus, two things happened: (1) PCGR and VGR were combined into one site, and (2) the merged site was converted to use the same common layout and technology as all other review sites owned by E-Centives. From a business perspective, these decisions seem prudent.

Video games have a specific culture and therefore specific ways that readers search for them, read about them, etc. Obviously, you need to be able to conduct a search on PC games only, console games only, and console games on a specific platform. The staff behind the new VGR site knows this. They also know that platform-specific, alphabetical listings of games are a key way that users search and compare video games. Having said all of this, converting PCGR and VGR to use the common template of all other E-Centives review sites was a big job. Because the common template did not support the unique features specific to video game culture, these features were lost during the conversion process. The VGR staff is well aware that these features are essential and missing. These features will be coming back, but you must give the staff time for these to be programmed, integrated etc. So... have patience (something Lara has had to say to me a few times) and your beloved VGR site will be all that it once was and more.

By comparison, I hated the new bulletin board when I first started using it. While I still miss the full-screen, threaded view of the old board, there are many features on the new board that I like. For example, you can now edit posts to correct typos, spelling errors, and the like after you've posted. You gotta' love that! If we give things a bit of time to get worked out, I think we will all be impressed with the end result.

One thing I'd also like to note: there are not too many free web sites where you have people the likes of Lara and Chris around. These folks answer questions calmly, deal with user requests in a timely fashion, and are generally just super-nice people to deal with. To me, this is the best feature of VGR and it remains as good as (and better than) it ever has been. Just a few days ago, Chris increased the size of the thread window for me because I wanted to be able to see more threads on my screen simultaneously. I mean, let's get serious for a moment. How many free web sites respond and act on user requests like this? The culture and spirit here are unbelievable. It will be a bit painful while all the details of the new site get worked out, but in the end, I can't imagine that you'll find the culture of VGR in too many other places on the web.

Give the VGR folks a bit of patience, voice your concerns constructively (which you have), and things will improve.

RH.

[Chris]

<div class=\"smallfont\">Maneatingcow,

While I agree with everything you wrote, here is my understanding of the situation. (Lara or Chris, please step in here anytime if I'm wrong.) PCGR and VGR were combined together because they are part of a much bigger picture - about a dozen sites (all owned by parent company E-Centives) on different topics from golf, to stereos, to video games. It did not make sense to maintain two sites on video games when, in the bigger picture, both sites are really about the same topic. Likewise, with the exception of PCGR and VGR, all the other sites used a common layout and behind-the-scenes-technology. To have PCGR and VGR using a different layout and different technology meant a lot more work and expense. Thus, two things happened: (1) PCGR and VGR were combined into one site, and (2) the merged site was converted to use the same common layout and technology as all other review sites owned by E-Centives. From a business perspective, these decisions seem prudent.............

Give the VGR folks a bit of patience, voice your concerns constructively (which you have), and things will improve.

RH.</div>
Thank you Richard, you said it perfectly. I'm glad we've finally got the point through to someone. Everyone thinks we did this out of the blue, when in fact, the change has been planned for over a year - it just didn't happen because of other priorities in the company. Now that we're so strapped for resources, we need all sites using the same platform for efficiency. Simply put, we couldn't afford to keep PCGR and VGR on the old platforms. They were sucking up valuable engineering time, they were difficult to manage, and we had little/no functionality improvements added to them in the past year because we stopped developing for the old platform.

That is all in the past now. Improvements for the new VGR site are coming, but many will have to understand that the new design isn't really new anymore. It's been implemented on 8 of our 11 community websites (9 now) for almost 2 years now. Though it does need some enhancements that will be unique to the gaming site, the overall design has worked pretty well for our other sites. We're confident that we can make it work here as well. As I said, now that we finally moved it over to the new platform, we can start designing and developing functionality needed in the gaming community.

[Lara]

As requested by Chris, please post any new questions/comments to this thread about the site change.

Official Site Change Thread - feedback and complaints here please

Post all feedback here in this thread!!!!!

http://forums.videogamereview.com/showthread.php?threadid=393