New SIte Design for burningman.org

[Jovankat]

So BMOrg has changed the official Burning Man site from buringman.com to burningman.org to reflect the organisations non-profit status and with that change has come a redesign of the site.

What does everyone think?

I'm really not keen on the design, it looks messy and unstructured and it seems like finding the info you're looking for is more complicated than it should be.

I also think links to ePlaya, the first timers & survival guides and the ticket page should be more prominent.

[danibel]

I like it.

I think it will take some time to get used to the new navigation. I found the link to the ticket page in one click "2015 event."

It definitely needed a refresh and this is fresh. I like the way the images are in different sizes but still on a grid.

I am a web designer so maybe I am bit more lenient on the style.

[Jovankat]

I am a web designer so maybe I am bit more lenient on the style.

I would have thought that would have the opposite effect. I'm not a professional web designer but I've been making websites on and off for a long time and am pretty interested in UX and I think that makes me more critical.

The different sized images is exactly what I was referring to when I said I thought it looked messy and unstructured.

You're totally right that the old site needed a refresh, and it was pretty messy looking too.

[danibel]

Well they definitely did not keep with the placement of the standard left menu. Most usability experts will ding them for wasting valuable top left real estate (it's where we naturally look for info), but overall I like the look and feel. It's different. Modern.

[Bless]

I don't much care for the new site. It's difficult to navigate and kind of cheesy-looking. I liked the foreboding nature of the old website.

[Jovankat]

Different? It's a super generic bootstrap layout. I was really hoping for something a little more bespoke and creative.

[Meat Hunter]

I am not the least bit impressed with the new website one iota.

In my opinion, it is a real pain in the rear to navigate - if one can navigate it a'tall.

[Elderberry]

It's responsive, so that's a big plus.

[trilobyte]

It's worth pointing out that neither this site nor this board are intended as places to post feedback for the Burning Man web site. Use the Contact Us page (at the bottom of the site's pages) to send feedback to the team involved in that site's design.

[danibel]

I think people just want to talk about it. But thanks for the link!

[Jovankat]

Yeah I posted this thread just to discuss it. I figured this what the most appropriate place for it since the website design is not tied to a particular year and the discussion is related to BM so it's not just Open Discussion fodder. Feel free to move it if you think it belongs somewhere else.

The idea of submitting feedback about the design of their new site it rather funny. My criticisms are pretty subjective and it's not like they've been all that responsive to the actual important feedback they've been getting about the running of the event itself...

[trilobyte]

In that case, giving this thread a nudge over to politics and philosophy, since that's a better fit than ePlaya feedback. Carry on with the whining, wailing, criticism, and/or praise.

[EspressoDude]

I see that the new background for the website fully embraces unregulated lasers, the wiggly blue lines through the sky.
Like those that blinded a Black Rock Ranger / Sandman in 2014.

[Lonesomebri]

In that case, giving this thread a nudge over to politics and philosophy, since that's a better fit than ePlaya feedback. Carry on with the whining, wailing, criticism, and/or praise.

Thanks!

It's nice to have a forum where people concerned with Burning Man can go and discuss Burning Man with other people concerned with Burning Man, and what better fit than eplaya?
Us little people don't have other burner websites to put out our views and pick up feedback, share opinions and outlook, so we come here. The exchange of ideas and opinions is not a silly burden or wasted time for some of us. Ha, whining, wailing, criticism, and/or praise, as if the conversation of actual life was made of something other, something nobler.....

Yeah, last years web design was better.

[pink]

I think it's pretty but crappy. Very hard to navigate with the index at the bottom of the page, you've got to scroll like crazy to find anything. And navigating through the blog pages? Yeah, good luck finding anything. Not user friendly at all!

[Tiahaar]

The key to easy navigation I find is the top right 'Menu' button. Click that and you get a whole right side menu bar with dropdowns for additional info. Works very nice. The rest is for show

[vargaso]

It's a slightly tweaked Bootstrap template, which I don't fault them at all for going with. Bootstrap has a lot of baked in functionality that there's no reason to try to reinvent. I'm guessing the back-end was updated and probably the content management system. And, very importantly, it's a responsive site now, meaning it looks good and functions well on any sized screen. I'm with some of you in thinking they home page looks jumbled, but some of the content areas have been surfaced, making them easier to find. All in all, I like it. Sure, it could have been a hand-rolled site, and maybe the design is not quite as striking as you'd expect from Burning Man, but it's a nice update, in my opinion, and I do this kind of thing for a living.

[Corvus]

My biggest gripe is the lack of (or difficulty in finding) the blog archive that used to be on the bottom right of the blog. You know, the one that has the current year broken down with the number of blog entries month by month, and expandable sections for the previous years. With the intermittent posting I'd been in the habit of checking the count to decide if I should bring up a fresh entry (Hmmm, November's still 6 - nope) or move onto something else in a matter of moments. In the admittedly cursory search I've done so far, I haven' found it.

Also, it doesn't come up well at work, but that's not the fault of the website or designer, but my IT guy here refusing to update past MIE 8.0

[DoctorIknow]

Change for the sake of change is how I see it. And as an extra benefit, another way to postpone answering questions about P4Play camps.

I suppose it might be "modern," meaning it looks like what many have been trained to accept: make information photo based.

Scroll this, scroll that,,,all fingers on tablet sliding and tapping.

I and millions have endured Windows 8 and still favor PC's, so the learning curve of retraining myself will just be another exercise in bowing to the experts idea of what is useful. (no doubt great for website designer experts, but they may be the only ones benefiting.)

[tamarakay]

Its my understanding that the website update was in the works and under design/testing/implementation way before the fiasco over plug and play came up.

I'm neutral on the changes. I like the old blog archive too and miss that. It was fun to just randomly click a month from a random year. But I do like the search thing that comes up.

[Token]

Wow, just saw the new website.

Talk about taking the worst elements of myspace and slapping them together.

Just WOW! El Toro burrito vomit kind of sums up the experience

[Bless]

Will eplaya be heading over to the new .org domain?

[mdmf007]

meh, like all things change is inevitable. I think it needed to be freshened up.

MDMF