Homepage Redesign and Avatar Revamp

[Tom]

The Home page of The Elder Stats website has been redesigned over the course of this weekend. The Home page has been updated with this new design, and it looks quite different and more detailed than before. Along with this update, we decided to revamp the avatar system a bit for those characters that do not have avatars selected.

Home Page Redesign
We were getting a bit bored of the simple and plain design that was previously employed on the Home page. It didn't offer much detail, and not enough information was provided for each character. We wanted to come up with a good-looking way to incorporate character avatars in the listing of the Newest Characters and Latest Updated Characters on the Home page. So we redesigned the Home page to be more detailed and better-looking than ever before. The Latest Announcements for the website are still shown on the Home page, just on the sidebar in a smaller font size. Also, the Random Character is now listed at the very top of the sidebar with the avatar of that character listed alongside it. This provides an opportunity for characters to get more publicity from the viewers of The Elder Stats. Click here to check out the new Home page.

Avatar System Revamp
We have also done a slight "revamp" of the character avatar system. Previously, if a character did not have an avatar selected for his/her profile, then wherever their avatar was to be shown, it would simply show an Oblivion symbol with a textured background. Since there are quite a lot of characters without avatars, we decided to diversify the avatar system with new images. Now, if a character does not have an avatar selected, their avatar will be shown as an icon for their specific race. Therefore, if a Nord character does not have an avatar, then his avatar will be shown as a small picture of a Nord on his stat card and on other places of the website until the creator uploads an avatar for him. This allows for the avatar system to be more diversified and interesting. To view the full list of race-related avatars, click here.

So that is a summary of the recent changes on the Home page and the character avatar system. We hope you enjoy these new updates and, as always, we welcome your suggestions and feedback!

If you would like to discuss this announcement, please feel free to reply directly to this topic.

[Oddbrother]

I just checked my custom race, and I'm lucky enough to have an avatar for it before this happened. What if I deleted it?

I'm liking the new home page, too. But it can and will get bland very fast if people aren't getting custom avatars for their characters anyways. Hopefully with this redesign, it'll remind them.

[Tom]

I just checked my custom race, and I'm lucky enough to have an avatar for it before this happened. What if I deleted it?

If you deleted your current avatar, the system would not recognize your race and would just show the Oblivion symbol as your avatar.

I'm liking the new home page, too. But it can and will get bland very fast if people aren't getting custom avatars for their characters anyways. Hopefully with this redesign, it'll remind them.

That's what I'm hoping, too. If not, then it could be bland. But hopefully in the future as more new characters are created, their creators will notice that they can upload avatars for their characters and we will have an even more diverse Home page.

[josjie]

Looks really good!

You know I'm seriously thinking of starting a new Oblivion character so that I can upload it here . But atm I like Half-Life 2, Modern Warfare 2 and Borderlands more .

Maybe you could change the "Top Members" list as well? What about mouse-over pop-ups with detailed info (including your avatar)?

And something similar for the leaderbords?

[Tom]

Maybe you could change the "Top Members" list as well? What about mouse-over pop-ups with detailed info (including your avatar)?

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll look into doing something like this soon. It sounds like a nice idea.

And something similar for the leaderbords?

That's also a good idea. However, I don't want to overload the page with Javascript. Many web developers make the mistake of overloading their pages with too much Javascript code, then the website becomes slower to load and less user-friendly. However, a simple mouseover effect using Javascript probably wouldn't be too cumbersome for the page load. Of course, users with Javascript disabled in their browsers wouldn't be able to see the mouseover, but that's just their loss. I was originally thinking of including more information about a character right under their name on the leaderboards, but with the mass amount of characters that are displayed in the leaderboards, I fear that approach would make the page too large in height. So, yes, a mouseover would be a better alternative in this case.

Thanks again for the suggestions, and I'm glad to see you are enjoying the website.