Total Coverage #6, Drax design.

Hello everyone, welcome to a new entry of Total Coverage!

As you have noticed the TO home has had its front heavily renovated. Fear not tho, the family inside it is still the same wacky bunch! In this post Total Coverage get down and nasty with the Guru that made it happen: Drax. The interview starts with focus on the page itself, but Drax’s thoughts of the whole community are soon passed on in this entry of Total Coverage.

Enjoy.

What made you feel it was time for a new design of our homepage?
Well, we’ve really had this in the pipe line for so long I can’t explain, but trust me ever since version 1 of the TO website it’s been a case of the right people having the time to make it happen.

What was your goal with the design?
With the move to wordpress and the influx of creative writers showing their interest in adding content to the site we had alot of different articles that were being published, but due to the way the site was originally laid out, it just didnt acheive the click through rate on the articles.

The goal was to really get people to see the effort the whole community is giving to making the gears run at TO Towers. We’ve added a featured section (the top graphic slideshow) the second row are gaming articles, followed by any community updates.

We wanted people to notice these, but not get too lost in all of it, theres still some way to go before its as seamless as possible in terms of getting the right categories for all the articles but with a breif documentation for the writers, that should clear things up.

What do you think of the results so far?
The results are fantastic, we saw a conversion rate in page views litterally two fold followed by them quadroupling (moving from an avg 45 page views to an avg of 70 and a spike of 210 [on Saturday 30th], yeah the results are going to be great, lets hope we can keep delivering the content. I work in marketing so seeing a trend steeply climb on a graph like we’ve seen the last week has been really exciting, in a non geeky way .

What inspired you in the design?
The layout itself was tried and tested from the All U Play website, we’d like to migrate and update a few of the review / articles on that site to the TO website soon, we’ve got such a strong website here that it just makes sense to bring it back home rather than put it out on that lonely island that is AllUPlay.

The nuclear symbol, the red and black, the general apocalypse style you see on the websites background and logo stems hugely from the old Planetside roots. We played a faction thats colours were Red and Black, it was rather Totallitarian in storyline and we were the armoured core of that server, delivering a rolling thuder, an apocalypse with dual 100mm cannons to boot. That and the sucess we have in any game involving nukes and tanks, such as World in Conflict, you might remember from those proud days.

Are you happy with the feedback provided by community members?
What can I say, the community has high expectations, they should, its what keeps us moving forward. As I said before, there is still a long path to take and its all about getting the time to do it. Dash has been great and has mucked in when ever possible, he’s really learning the ropes needed to tame the TO website and pro actively encouraging the updates on the website. I just wish I could devote more time to making it as seemless and intergrated as possible with all the features that we need but I have a day job to do too!

The design is always ongoing, I think we’ve reached a format that we can stick wtih for a while, making the refinements needed to really smooth the edges and polish the neglected areas. Function over form, it has to be due to the on going usage of the website, though it goes against the artist in me.

Did you want to implement something more in the new site? (if yes: what, and why did it get left behind)
As I said before there are always things to add to this site, I know something that we’ve been trying to get working in a format that works for everyone for litterally years, and thats a really fluid, intergrated calender but without tapping into some huge Steam API somewhere and writing our own calender script its going to be alot of searching.

We’ve looked into a number of ways to intergrate phpbb3 with wordpress, using other CMS platforms, even going as far as buying the vBulletin software and intergrate a CMS over the top it (something I did for freelance recently [http://www.kentscoobies.com]) trouble with that is, its very rigid. The software is great, but getting the functionality that we have with wordpress into a huge, seriously massive peice of software like vbulletin and juggling the updates of both is a massive problem for us when we have limited time to update the site along.

How does it feel so have such a big e-peen and not even brag about it?
Well I try to keep it under wraps, but you know how these things are.

No really, the heros you need to be aware of are the community themselves, everyone and anyone who wants to participate in writing content for the site, the work you do (good job by the way), the admin work that Nalan and Smoos3 do that most people are blissfully unaware of, and the effort that people like Dash go through to keep the gears turning, they should be the ones who are bragged about, I just put peices of puzzles together

Always look forward to more of these, keep up good the work.

Also just a sideline, we’re hoping to have a raffle in the new year where people can win some great gaming prizes.

I also want to work something out for the WII gamers we have in the community soon, got a game sitting here that needs sending out to a lucky player, might do a lottery

Thank you for the interview Drax.
Interview ends here, as a end note i would like to remind everyone about the TO-Curtis awards! After answering the questions for his interview Drax swiftly went on and created a great signature in perfect TO Curtis spirit. Now that we finally have a trophy to hand out, keep an eye on this space – when you least expect it YOU might be given an award worthy to brag about. Total Coverage #4, TO Curtis Award

/Prox