Vivi22's Ramblings of a Slightly Tired Man 3
Nothing like having to leave things until the last minute.
So front site up first. I'll say up front that I almost never visit it. I do keep up with the articles and news stories using the side bar in the forum, but there's not a whole lot on the front site that's of interest to me. After 20 years of playing these games and not really wanting to dive as deeply into many of the new ones as I would have when I was younger, my need to look up information about FF titles is pretty non-existent most of the time.
That said, I did find myself low on ability spheres in my current run of FFX for the Eyeson Plays and looked up what monsters drop them. Turns out none do on the Mushroom Rock road and I'll either have to keep going or go back. So yay for bestiaries and ctrl+f I suppose.
As for what I'd like to see, some consistent formatting would be nice. Even in selecting what section you want from the menu bar on the left of a particular game the ordering is all over the place. Why are member reviews at the very top in FFIX and FFXII when they're near the bottom in every other game section I looked at? Even if they were just in alphabetical order it'd make it easier to find things. And when I actually looked at the user reviews they were all formatted differently. Some are walls of text, some have tables. Some of the walkthroughs are just presented on the site, some have pictures, some are just linked to and presented in GameFaqs style plain text.
I spent about 10-20 minutes flipping between different sections to see what's there and what we need and sweet jesus did it frustrate me that every section looks so different. I realize some of it may be the remnants of earlier versions of the site and formatting done by either the users or earlier site developers, but if there's one thing I'd like to see changed first and foremost it would be developing some consistent standards and working to implement them as much as we can so that users know what they can expect to see on every page. There should be no hunting for a particular menu option, or being linked to plain text documents if we can avoid. There should be a consistent visual look with consistent usability on every single page.
I realize it might be a monumental task to go through and change all of that, but hey, we're wish listing here. Right now though, with the inconsistencies in layout and formatting, it just screams unprofessional/haphazardly slapped together to me.
Anyway, on to my thoughts on this round. I like it so far. I've got most of my article done, just about to trim it down to avoid my usual walls of text (see example above). I'm looking forward to seeing everyone's articles, and definitely like the idea of wanting staff more involved in coming up with front site content.
