User talk:Aichon/Sandbox/Demo13

Rationale

First off, I realized that without putting the links at the top and stretching them out horizontally, there really was no way to make them all visible to a person visiting the page. So, instead of trying to force the issue of making them visible, I focused on our original goal, which was to make players aware of them. Towards that end, I put them in a single-file column that is immediately visible when the page loads. As a result, while not all of the links are immediately visible, a visitor to the page would easily understand that there are additional helpful links below the ones they can already see.

Second, I felt like we were missing an opportunity to group some other content. Game news, wiki news, and UD History are all about events that are happening or have happened, so it makes sense to group them together, that way people can tell at a glance what all is going on. Unfortunately, all three of those have content of variable sizes, which means that we need to group them vertically, rather than horizontally. As a result, the only place to put them is opposite the column of links, so I placed them on the right and the links on the left since it's both closer to what we have now and just generally felt better visually.

Third, I still needed to address low res screens, and with columns on both sides, that gets a bit tricky. To try and handle that, what I did was set up the Community Projects and Featured Article sections to automatically try and rearrange themselves so as to best make use of the space available, thus minimizing the amount of awkward whitespace. At low resolutions, they either rearrange themselves into a single column or else move down the page to places where there is more space available.

It's definitely not perfect, however. For instance, to try and make that rearranging stuff work as nicely as possible, I used a few paragraphs of fluff wording that is essentially just wasting space. I'd love to replace it with something that's actually useful. Also, the code for it is atrocious right now, since I wasn't cleaning up old stuff as I made changes and scrapped failed ideas. It needs to be cleaned up and templated out at a minimum, and that's assuming it's an acceptable design in the first place, of which even I am not convinced. Nonetheless though, I feel that it warrants a quick discussion. —Aichon— 05:05, 15 October 2012 (BST)

Quick note: the switch to having FA and CP above/below each other means that the fluff text is no longer necessary. Yay. Now, for bed! —Aichon— 08:33, 15 October 2012 (BST)

I like this. --Ross Less Ness ^{Enter Stranger...} 11:32, 15 October 2012 (BST)

A lot of the center text needs to go and this actually looks pretty gnarly on small screens because of the left hand menu column. --02:44, 18 October 2012 (BST)