I'm going to reiterate some of the more constructive criticisms from the /tg/ thread: While
the redundancies were annoying, and some things could be better
integrated into each other, LFG is a big part of the site and
absolutely needs to be front and center. A little "subscribe"
button in the toolbar is generally less obtrusive and easier to find
than just throwing in a subscribe link every time someone comes across a
section of the site that has subscription-only features. It
should also be noted that one of the key goals of UI design is reducing
the
amount of digging around someone has to do to find what they want. The
three biggest ways of doing this are by minimizing the clicks and
rollovers to get where you want, and by minimizing the amount of
scrolling required. Generally, this means you want to avoid nested
dropdown menus where necessary and put the important things front and
center. A key element of design in this scenario is visual hierarchy.
Basically, the most important elements, like games, the forums, LFG, and
stuff like that need to be front and center, while little things like
the twitter feed can be shunted off to the side. By that same token,
many of the site's navigation features could also be moved away from the
dropdown menus up top to a sidebar
like what Wikipedia, Cracked, Facebook, Twitter, TV Tropes, Youtube, and
god knows how many other websites use, while keeping a lot of the big
stuff like the forums, the games menu, LFG, tools, and the store up top. By
the same token, there's too much white. The addition of gray on the
sides is a half-step in the right direction, but it's still much too
light. Generally, you want light colors on a neutral background,
typically dark blue or gray, something that's known to be much easier on
the eyes than dark text on a white background, while also not using the
same background for the full page. Use a darker shade of the main
color, maybe with some sort of pattern or design for the bars to the
left and the right of the main body of the page. As a side note, I'd also suggest reducing the size of stuff like recent games and the twitter feed. I know scaling issues are always hard to pull off, but they still look rather oversized.
