(complete) website redesign

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leooooo
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(complete) website redesign

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Postby leooooo » Thu Apr 23, 2020 6:31 am

Hey guys,

for me and for many other people, and especially considering that the fourth rebuild movie is going to be released in the next couple of months, evegeeks.org and its wiki is the absolute go to spot if you want to know something about evangelion (and I say this as one of the key-people of the german evangelion fandom wikia). However I have to point out that one of the major things that I really have to complain about every time I visit this website, is the in my opinion absolutely ugly webdesign - sorry, really don't want to offend the person behind it.

And I really have to say too, that to this day I have not figured out how this website design works: On mobile you (sometimes?) have a really modern news page, while on desktop you still have the old one. If you go to the wiki now, there is the redesigned page which is badly optimized for mobile and looks more boring than the ugly design from before. The forum's design looks completely different from the news and wiki. The overall evageeks.org webdesign is completely inconsistent and in most areas really old-fashioned. I know this comes down to the different systems that are used for the news page, wiki and forum. I think I remember phpBB (forum) being fairly hard to design, while mediawiki and the newspage should be absolutely possible to do.

I am sure, there are many other and more important things to brag about and rework on a wiki, but I think even a small redesign could really elevate the user experience. Of course I am also saying this because this is something I could actually help out here. I really enjoy designing websites or digital design as a whole and really want to help out this wiki considering that I used it for the past 8-9 years to learn more about evangelion.

I completely say this from my point of perspective. Feedback from not only other users but also admins and other team members of this website is required to make such a project possible. To say there are more important things to do than the design of a wiki is completely okay, but I am sure that I am not the only one wanting to help out redesigning evageeks and I think there are many ideas out there how to achieve such a goal.

Blockio
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Re: (complete) website redesign

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Postby Blockio » Thu Apr 23, 2020 6:44 am

The big problem with the wiki is that the whole layout portion of it broke a while ago, and a lot of imageboards and wikis had to cobble together a hotfix for the wiki to be accessible at all. If you have the skill and time to code a new interface, we would very much appreciate that - here are some threads on the matter

As far as the design itself is concerned - for one, apart from you, there aren't exactly many people who mind it, and considering that it is built on a pre-made forum software with a ton of custom code, the amount of effort necessary to redesign it would be ridiculous and in no proportion to the payoff even if absolutely everyone agreed that the new design is better (Spoilers: They won't)

Also, as a fellow German, being "one of the key-people of the german evangelion fandom wikia" is absolutely nothing to brag about in all honesty. That thing ain't great.
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Re: (complete) website redesign

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Postby pwhodges » Thu Apr 23, 2020 8:48 am

View Original PostBlockio wrote:If you have the skill and time to code a new interface, we would very much appreciate that

...and the dedication to carry it through to the end, and beyond for, at the least, early maintenance.

Many of the people who set this up are still around and involved; but they have work, families and other interests - their lives no longer revolve around Evangelion, which is why activity on the systems is mostly emergency repairs these days.

The highly customised wiki broke when the old core software it was based on no longer functioned with a PHP update. Installing the updated software lost all that customisation, so minimal changes have been incorporated to restore function. But to do a thorough job would take much longer, and also means also committing to the need at times in the future to revise the customisation to keep up with future changes in the underlying infrastructure. And so it goes...

The forum had a similar problem several years ago, and was updated to the then current version, with some but not all of the previous customisation restored. It is now one point release behind the base software. As for its design - well, the basis is one of the two most widely used forum softwares, so it can't be accused of being oddball, at least! And the theme is a reasonable reconstruction of the theme which had been in use before.
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