seanality wrote:1. There needs to be an easier way to get from the forums back to the front page.
2. It would be cool to have a gallery with an album system so pictures from all the old lans can be uploaded. (who knows when gotfrag will be going down)
3. There should be a page with all the previous league champs just like sp3c.org has.
4. Like #3 there should be something with some crosshair packs and some commands so people don't keep asking the same damn questions.
1. Yeah I agree. The way the forums connect with the front-page in general is really wacky and I'm not happy with it, working on it.
2. Gotfrag isn't going anywhere, MLG is bringing it back. But yeah, it would be cool to have a gallery system.
3. Yeah, I agree, working on a whole DoD history/past champs page.
4. It's on the list, just not as high a priority as finding the best way for the community to communicate and consolidate our "news".
Thanks for starting this conversation, I've been wondering what direction to take this thing.
I'm working on a new revamp of the site, but I'm not sure what direction we will go from here. To be honest, I've been disappointed in a lot of ways with the current version and how it has played out. I went into it thinking that we would have a lot more front-page content going on, and that hasn't turned out to be the case. We simply just don't have anyone posting anything on a regular basis (news updates, predictions, movies, articles).
In the good ole days, pretty much everything made it to the front-page, whether it was simple match predictions or weekly results, a quick update about players moving from team to team, a chronicle of an epic e-fight, or Image getting all meta and writing articles about the existential body of work the community was producing as a whole.
In retrospect, I think that's what made 1911, 1911. It was a simple yet intimate connection to the core of the community, and that died when 1911 went to gotfrag. That connection to the inner-working monster of our small community was shut off.
The one thing that has been successful has been these "behind the gamer" articles. People really stepped up and flooded me with those, and they've been a huge hit. The community unfortunately just has not produced a lot of other content since we launched the new version, which leaves us with this big gotfrag-like site with all this stuff on the front page that isn't getting updated.
It's also worth noting that our page views are as high as they have ever been. We are getting about 200 unique visitors to the site per day, and over 300 unique visitors checking out the site every week. This means that there are about 300 people in the world that still care enough about dod to check out 1911. Most days we are getting about 500-700 total page-views.
These are by no means HUGE numbers, but my point is, there are far more people coming to the site and viewing the site than there are people actually posting and contributing content and commenting on things. I'd like to fix that.
As with any community driven site, it is always a work in progress and you are constantly learning about your audience. With this current version, my idea was to attempt to bring the best of both worlds together as best we could (old 1911 and gotfrag). In the end, I don't know how much I like it, and I miss the nostalgia of the old site.
What do you think the best way to go about this is?
Should we scale things back and go back to a more simpler front page ala
1911 #1, or
1911 #2, or do we keep heading in the same direction and try and fix the bugs as we go? (weird navigation between forums, fucked up avatars, difficult to find content, general awkwardness)
Thanks for your thoughts.
[quote="seanality"]1. There needs to be an easier way to get from the forums back to the front page.
2. It would be cool to have a gallery with an album system so pictures from all the old lans can be uploaded. (who knows when gotfrag will be going down)
3. There should be a page with all the previous league champs just like sp3c.org has.
4. Like #3 there should be something with some crosshair packs and some commands so people don't keep asking the same damn questions.
[/quote]
1. Yeah I agree. The way the forums connect with the front-page in general is really wacky and I'm not happy with it, working on it.
2. Gotfrag isn't going anywhere, MLG is bringing it back. But yeah, it would be cool to have a gallery system.
3. Yeah, I agree, working on a whole DoD history/past champs page.
4. It's on the list, just not as high a priority as finding the best way for the community to communicate and consolidate our "news".
Thanks for starting this conversation, I've been wondering what direction to take this thing.
I'm working on a new revamp of the site, but I'm not sure what direction we will go from here. To be honest, I've been disappointed in a lot of ways with the current version and how it has played out. I went into it thinking that we would have a lot more front-page content going on, and that hasn't turned out to be the case. We simply just don't have anyone posting anything on a regular basis (news updates, predictions, movies, articles).
In the good ole days, pretty much everything made it to the front-page, whether it was simple match predictions or weekly results, a quick update about players moving from team to team, a chronicle of an epic e-fight, or Image getting all meta and writing articles about the existential body of work the community was producing as a whole.
In retrospect, I think that's what made 1911, 1911. It was a simple yet intimate connection to the core of the community, and that died when 1911 went to gotfrag. That connection to the inner-working monster of our small community was shut off.
The one thing that has been successful has been these "behind the gamer" articles. People really stepped up and flooded me with those, and they've been a huge hit. The community unfortunately just has not produced a lot of other content since we launched the new version, which leaves us with this big gotfrag-like site with all this stuff on the front page that isn't getting updated.
It's also worth noting that our page views are as high as they have ever been. We are getting about 200 unique visitors to the site per day, and over 300 unique visitors checking out the site every week. This means that there are about 300 people in the world that still care enough about dod to check out 1911. Most days we are getting about 500-700 total page-views.
[img]http://nineteeneleven.org/sears/traffic.jpg[/img]
These are by no means HUGE numbers, but my point is, there are far more people coming to the site and viewing the site than there are people actually posting and contributing content and commenting on things. I'd like to fix that.
As with any community driven site, it is always a work in progress and you are constantly learning about your audience. With this current version, my idea was to attempt to bring the best of both worlds together as best we could (old 1911 and gotfrag). In the end, I don't know how much I like it, and I miss the nostalgia of the old site.
What do you think the best way to go about this is?
Should we scale things back and go back to a more simpler front page ala [url=http://web.archive.org/web/20021122161558/http://nineteeneleven.org/]1911 #1[/url], or [url=http://web.archive.org/web/20030127232443/http://www.nineteeneleven.org/]1911 #2[/url], or do we keep heading in the same direction and try and fix the bugs as we go? (weird navigation between forums, fucked up avatars, difficult to find content, general awkwardness)
Thanks for your thoughts.