Let me preface by saying that I speak for myself and my cohorts by describing you as some sort of weird god, to whom we are grateful and willing to tithe.

I use the HOC to check on comments and DIF-related stuff, and yeah, it's...a website with a learning curve.  Basically the site is a database with a large number of ways to sort the data it stores. The issue is that there's so much text and so many columns and graphs and lines going on that it runs together, and it takes your brain a second to start sorting it out. The homepage is a seven foot tall list of movies.

In terms of cleaning it up, I'd simplify the process for a user to find what they're looking for. (I also really hate the clouds of text in different sizes to indicate relative clickability. They're an eyesore and I never use 'em anyway.) Right now the user has access to everything at once, which would be great if there was a way to make it look less intimidating.

If it was set up so that the home page was one wide column that was just updates and blog posts, your typical news posts that summarize the past few days in commentary land, that would inject a bit more personality into the proceedings. Along the left side, links like "find a show, find a movie," simpler than the current set up, would ease the user into the workings of everything.

I'm looking for a commentary for The Phantom Menace.

*clicks "Find a Movie"*

This pulls up a page with a search bar, and below that a list of letters. I could either type in "phantom," and find The Phantom Menace next to Phantom of the Opera, or I could click "P," and look for "Phantom Menace, The."

Hey look, there's eighteen commentaries! I don't even know who to pick.

by: Sonic.Cinema
by: Film.Pigs
by: Renegade.Commentaries
by: Rifftrax
by: MMM.Commentaries
by: Adudathuda
by: Speakeasy

by: Film.Fever.Radio
by: Kore.Commentary
by: STAN.Podcast
by: IHN.Radio
by: Down.in.Front
by: Switched.on.Show

by: Cantina.Commentary
by: Red.Letter.Media • Tysto.Commentaries
by: Cantina.Commentary • Nathan.P.Butler
by: Commentary.Track.Stars
by: Clone.Cast

(Incidentally, I know Nathan Butler. Small world.)

Helpfully, these are separated into chunks for me. "Comedy" "Discussion" and "Riff." (I've added paragraph returns in the list above to illustrate as much, for example.) I'm not in the mood for an MST3k of the thing, and I've already had my share of laughs at George, so I'm gonna choose from the "discussion" sorted episodes, based on the tweet-length summaries of the shows. Hooray!

Back on the home page, clicking "find a show" brings up a list of all of the available podcasts, sorted similarly, with the same tweet-length summary.

Comedy

Down in Front

Weekly | 86 Episodes | Four industry professionals sit down informally to discuss the working parts of movies, to the great amusement of themselves.

Discussion

Film Grok

Weekly | 15 Episodes | Reasoned discussion and insight into films and the filmmaking process.

So on. (I don't know if "weekly" or "15" is right for Grok.)

That kind of thing. I guess the "tl, dr" version is - yes, I can understand someone thinking the site is confusing. It's not incomprehensible, but it's not immediately intuitive. Don't even ask me about trying to find page two of the Down in Front quotes. (Prior to you making the special DIF-only quotes page that is now linked in the "press" section of DIF.) That said, you've put a colossal amount of work into this fucking thing, and changes should be considered heavily and only put into effect if everyone agrees.

It may not be a commentary, but my friends over at The Black Dog Podcast are revisiting Die Hard for their Christmas special. It will feature as their rose tinted specs segment where they look back on the notable films of our past. Lee and Darren are extraordinarily funny, so it should prove entertaining. Lee is a 3D animator for Cartoon Network so in my mind is not far removed from the Down in Front crew.

I'm a big fan of having the key content of a site on the main page, whatever site that might be, so that consumers don't have to look hard to find what they came for.   So I agree with keeping the list of available commentaries most prominent on the front page, because (I assume) that's what most people will be looking for when they go to zarban.com.   

That said, an alphabetical click-thru is probably a good idea, because the list of commentaries is so long.    A random person might come to the site thinking "i wonder if there's a commentary for Wuthering Heights?" and hitting the W link will probably get them an answer faster than scrolling.

I also think, while we're on the topic, that that functionality is sorely lacking on DIF's page.   The archive section is far from ideal - unless you can recognize the tiny thumbnail of a movie's poster, it's very difficult to tell what commentaries are available here.   There aren't even <IMG> tags to pop up the movie title on mouse rollover.   Hell, I know what movies we've done and I have a hard time finding a particular one when I want to.  So it'd be nice to have an alphabetical text list option available here as well.

I've found a way to group titles under a letter and then create a page for each letter. Then I can create fancy letter icons for the front page. I'll play around with that and with simplifying the left column. It'll be easy to undo if I want.

Last edited by Zarban (2010-12-13 08:00:23)

I never really had a problem navigating it, myself...

If you're going to submenu everything, I would have one link for "All Commentaries By Title," effectively like it was listed before. I haven't listened to much in the way of other (non-DIF) commentaries, but if I were to do so, it would be for background listening while I worked on something else. In which case I'd browse for a movie title and pick one of the commentaries available. I'd be less inclined to do that if I had to click through up to 27 different pages as a "Not Sure What I'm Looking For" penalty.

I've made some changes that I'll try out for a while. I think I still want a page that lists all titles somewhere, but now the front page features an alpha index and the most recent commentaries, with posters.