A lot of people complain about interface

I know how unhelpful "your site is difficult" can be. Se here is some friendly advice. Basically you don't use space well. the site is cluttered and there is no cohesive flow to things.

I have included a picture with some comments

picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/PO50L ...

It is a bit hard to read what is written in that image. I will try to comment on what I can read.

First, I don't know if you are aware, there was a design contest in 2009 that allowed any user propose new designs for the site, mainly the page headers and footers.

The site users could preview each of the designs before they voted on the proposal they liked more. The current design is the most voted by the users. So, certain things cannot be changed as they represent the preferences of the majority of the users that care about design issues.

There may be other design contests in the future, though.

You may want to read these articles to learn what happened in the contest:

phpclasses.org/blog/post/120-Launch ...

phpclasses.org/blog/category/web-si ...

Given that, the navigation bars, the advertising above the fold, logos and page titles were placed where they are by the winning design template.

The advertising appear integrated in the site design per recommendation of Google, thus it uses the same colors used in the site pages.

There should appear a 336x280 banner on the right side of the page below the fold. For some reason it is not appearing probably due to some JavaScript error in the banner code, but usually that space is not vacant.

There is one more comment on the left that I just can read a few words.

Anyway, thank you for the feedback.

About IMAGE: on the upper right hand corner of the image there is a magnifying glass. Click on that then on the "plus" sign on the left to see it full size. Or simply download the image


About the contest: I did not know about it but it was STRUCTURED ALL WRONG. The straight jacket of the "site theme designer" did not only dictate the structure (which by itself is a ridiculous premise for a redesign) but it dictated the tool! Instead of using my own photoshop for example, you force your editor on the entrants. I would not have entered.

So you ended up with a reduced pool of mostly techies and the few designers who knew about usability who where willing to put up your tool.

on top of that I assume it was a contest among your users, which makes it even worst! as few programmers are usability experts. For example, you like movies, right? can you direct one? NO! Just because you have the ability to like something does not make you qualified to opine on it.


About " this is what the community wants" look I am just pointing usability problems, you can delude yourself that this is what the community wants. I personally know I use this site very little because it is so difficult to use, essentially I just Google, come here and download. You have my email because I have to register to download, and I did not send your emails directly to spam because I kept deleting them instead of filtering, they are poorly formatted, difficult to follow and full of unnecessary graphics. You have great content, truly fantastic, but you are probably losing dedicated visitors. Someone else who complained was told they where not specific, but if being specific gets "that is the way it is" then there is no reason to be helpful.

First, I regret the fact that you feel the need to resort to a tone of offense and prejudice to express your opinions.

It seems there are several misunderstandings probably because you were not aware of the facts and so you seem to be blaming the circumstances to the wrong people. Let me clarify so you can try to understand.

First, the contest never disallowed anybody to use PhotoShop or any other tool to create design proposals. As a matter of fact I am sure the majority of the contestants used PhotoShop to create their design themes.

The contest design editor was meant to let contestants to preview their entries in different types of real site pages, at different resolutions, for different types of user profiles, so they can know in advance how it will look for real if the proposed design is applied in the site.

All they needed is to submit the files of HTML of the templates, CSS and graphic images. How they produced those files, it was something that the contest did not restrict. Everybody was free to use the tools they like most.

Another fact is that the site has over 1 million registered users and many of them are not exactly programmers (if that could really be a bad thing), but rather designers that had the need to use some PHP in their projects.

As a matter of fact the winning design was created by a professional Web designer that is also a Web design teacher.

I never said that the current design is what the community wants, but rather that it is what the majority of the users that care have chosen.

When it comes to design matters, it is impossible to please everybody because different people have different preferences. The winning design was just the one that got more votes. Other people would prefer another design, but the site can only use one.

Still the contest has run for several weeks during which users provided feedback to the contestants so they could improve any issues. So it was quite a democratic process that allowed to reach the best design possible, despite it is impossible to please everybody with a single design proposal.

As for the e-mail issues, you are only seeing those problems because you are using Gmail.

At the time of the contest it was impossible to anticipate that Gmail would start performing aggressive CSS filtering which would affect significantly the proposed designs.

If the contest was run today, it would certainly would require contestants to provide a seperate template for HTML e-mail messages and contestants could preview it after performing the same CSS filtering that Gmail performs, so there were no discrepancies between the proposed design and what the users can see.

Finally, I never discard any feedback, even when it comes in such in an aggressive tone like yours. I just hope you understand these clarifications so you can make specific improvement suggestions that can fit within the real constraints of the site.

Well thank you so very much! it turns out the site works beautifully now that I understand about the million users and the teacher-web designer, I suddenly find it much easier in traversing your site!!!. I will be dumping gmail promptly (none of the million must use it) so I will be fine.....Oh Wait. I just noticed that if I change my "tone" to "sarcastic" it is even easier to use! Alright!

Thanks!

I don't think you are making an effort to understand the explanations that were given. It just seems that you want to state you know all better than anybody else. Nevermind.