Welcome to Geekshow Entertainment
Friday, December 26th, 2008
By this point, you’ve probably had something lingering in the back your head. It keeps telling you, “Something is different here!” Of course you keep passing that off as crazy talk, and plowing ahead with what you were here to do. However, I’m here to tell you that you are not going crazy. You should listen to your brain. Something is different here, and that something is a new Geekshow site design. If you click below to continue reading this article, I’ll tell you a little more about that. Why has the site changed? What is new? What were we thinking? Those answers and more after the break.
Geekshow Entertainment – A Whole New Philosophy
The first thing that you should notice about the site, is that it has been given a proper name. What was once simply “Geekshow.us” is now “Geekshow Entertainment”. That may seem like a minor change to you, but it actually got quite a bit of discussion and planning time from us. Lately you may have noticed that we’ve put a lot more work into the development of the site as more of a community. We are encouraging people to comment on articles more often, but we are also working hard to increase the number of articles that are available for you to discuss. This is all part of a concentrated effort to mold the site into more of a community that you will want to frequently visit.
The addition of new writers to the site is one large step in the direction of increasing the appeal of the site. After all, a site is only as good as it’s content. In the past, our content was primarily focused around podcasts. And that will certainly continue into the future. However, what happens when your life suddenly changes and you no longer have the time or energy to listen to podcasts? With the old site, there was no longer a reason to continue hanging out on the site. The occasional article was likely posted that would catch your interest. However, it was often likely that you could have got that information elsewhere. With the new community mindset, that all changes. We brought in writers to not only keep you up to date on the latest news, but to also provide the site with fresh content in the form of original articles and reviews.
As a result of this change in how we do things, we thought that it was only right to give the site a new name. This new name reflects a move toward more professionalism while remaining a fun and entertaining place to hang out. But it was important at the same time to ensure that we didn’t get rid of the things that made you follow our site to begin with.
A Site Design That is Functional and Practical
When deciding on the new design for the new Geekshow Entertainment, we went through quite a few different designs. The site was actually headed in one direction, before the difficulties of that design fizzled the project out a bit. It wasn’t until we got back on track with plans to bring in writers that we decided to give the design process another go. The second effort is what you see today. The design you are now looking at comes from the initial selection of a theme from several options available to us. Once we decided on the theme, we heavily modified it to fit our own unique tastes and needs.
2 Column Display
The first thing that people will notice is likely the new 2 column layout on the main page. One column will be our site content, whereas the other will be dedicated to our podcasts. It took us a little bit to be sold on this look, because it’s a big difference from everything we’ve seen and used in the past. It redefines how we have to write our posts, and may take a while to get used to. However, it’s benefits should be instantly apparent to anyone that looks at it. The idea behind choosing that design was that we could offer up as much content as we can produce, while not negatively effecting the podcast portion of the website. Consider that 10 new articles in a day would push a relatively new podcast almost completely off the first page before people get a chance to check it out. This new design prevents that from happening. On the left, you will see all the latest episodes from your favorite podcasts. But on the right, you will see a chunk of articles that will usually be updated a few times each day. Two separate forms of entertainment, each given their own spotlight and focus. You pick the portions of the site that fit your needs, and you can easily pay attention to just those areas if you wish.
In addition, navigation has always been somewhat of an issue. With this site re-launch, we hope that we have taken care of most of those issues. We have two main navigation bars up top. At the very top of the page, you will find the site navigation. We make it easy to find information about Geekshow Entertainment by placing site-specific links up there. In addition, you can now easily login and out in order to make commenting easier. Below those tools, you will find the main navigation bar, which will help you in finding exactly the news/reviews/articles you want to see. If you have a specific desire to see the latest in Video Games or Comics, for instance, then you can do that with one click. The ability to easily navigate the site is something that we hope increases the enjoyment from users.
Multiple tabs for extra options
Over to the right, you will find a large selection of information tucked away into tabbed boxes. We minimize the vertical space required to view the information by making sure that the user only wants to see what they have selected. If you want to view recent comments, you select that tab. If you want to view a list of the site’s authors for better access to specific posts, then you have that ability too. It’s all about giving people options, while not flooding the site with useless information. In addition, all of this information is easy to change, should there be complaints in how it is presented, or the options available. With the old site design, when you changed things around, you had to tip-toe around everything to ensure you didn’t break something else.
All of this adds up to one of the goals of design. Create an interface that is useful, easy to use, and unobtrusive. But there is more to a site than just its ease of use. And we kept all of that in mind as well.
The Importance of Color, Imagery, and Consistency
The previous site design
A new site design needs to be as attractive as it is easy to use. So with this new design, we really wanted to improve on the look of everything in general. But it has also become a tradition for Geekshow.us to have site designs that maintain a similar theme from designs of the past. Seriously, check out our “History” page, where we show an image of each of the major site revisions. Each of them share one or two common factors. So it was important to keep that in mind in this iteration as well. That may not be as simple as it sounds when doing something as drastic as going from a dark background to a light background, but it was still important.
The new look is much brighter and cleaner
The first focus of the re-design was to pick a look that lightened the overall feel of the site. That was achieved by swapping the darker themes for the nearly-white background of the new theme. We realize that many people probably like the darker themes of old. To be honest, I was quite fond of them myself. However, the white background achieves a few things. First, it makes the site quite a bit more accessible. A majority of the sites you see are lighter, and so by making Geekshow a dark theme, you make it contrast nearly everything else. It’s good for originality, but not so much for acceptance from outsiders. The initial impression is quite often the only one you will get. Make it a good one, and you may have a new reader. Make it a bad one, and you will likely never see that person again. The next thing you achieve from a lighter background is a certain credibility and sense of professionalism. When you have a clean look, it is associated with professionalism, and more people will take things seriously. Finally, things are often designed to work with a a light background. Images will often have white borders, more themes are available, etc.
White, Red, and Gold are the new main site colors
A background color is a good place to start, but it’s far from a finishing point. To work toward a more complete site, we picked the main colors of the new design. We went with a red color that has mostly existed since the very first site design. To go along with red, we came up with a gold color that evolved from an orange-gold to the yellow-gold you see now. The color scheme is proudly reminiscent of the similar colors that were used in shows such as Smallville and Buffy. However, more importantly, the colors looked good together with the base of white. It was certainly better than the browns and grays that we started with.
GSE Logo
After choosing the colors, we began to look more closely at how to make the site look good. To help really make the site stand out, we wanted to work on a logo for the site that would take into consideration the colors we used and give the site a unique look at the same time. For that we approached the frequent Geek By Night artist, Kevin Zeigler, with a few ideas we had. One of the features we knew we wanted for the site was avatars. Originally, we mainly wanted them to have each writer’s articles stand out. So, the idea was for the logo to be done in the site’s red and gold, with cartoon-like versions of the site’s administrators hanging out around the site’s logo. The site was designed separately from the art, and it wasn’t until the end of the design project that everything was finally tied in together.
An image representating the post
Images are important part in making any site look good. The logo was one of our first efforts to capitalize on the effect of good images on the site. The second step was to really kick the use of pictures up in articles and on the front page. This was accomplished in two ways. The first way was to take a feature in the original theme, and really tweak it to fit our needs on the site. That feature is what we refer to as a “Representation Image”. The idea is to make one image really sum up the article. Then, the site’s theme takes that image and makes it the face of the article. It is shown on the main page, the search page, the archive page, and the post’s page. In the case of podcasts, that “Representation Image” is the show’s album art. It will be an easy way of instantly recognizing the podcasts you want to pay attention to. Simply spot the album art you care about, and then check out that episode.
Gallery of Images
The second way we’ve taken advantage of images is by making them more prominent in posts, and easier to view correctly. The method we now use to upload images ensures that each image will have several different sizes available. A small thumbnail all the way up to the original image’s size. When you see an image in a post, you will almost always be able to click on that image to get a larger version. Click on it again, and it will get larger again, all the way up to the original size. That is vast improvement on the ease of viewing images. But we’ve made them more prominent by making sure that each post has an attached gallery of any images that are attached to the post. This gallery sums up the article’s images, and allows you to easily pick out the pictures you want to see.
The Tools That Improve Your Visit
The final goal in improving the site comes from improving the tools you can use while on the site. A few of them have already been covered. Like the ability to easily login for easy comment posting. However, there is also a lot more available to you now. Many of these tools were added to the software we use for the site, Wordpress, since the last time we had done a major site upgrade. Some of these tools you may never use. But I hope that everyone at least gives each of them a look before deciding not to use them.
Avatars in use
This article has already discussed that we wanted to use avatars to the advantage of the writers of the site. Being able to “sign” your article with your avatar is an easy and attractive way to let people know who was responsible for each post. But there is a lot more to avatars than just that ability. More importantly, avatars allow each commenter to stand out. By allowing users to setup their own avatars, we in turn give visitors an extra way to spot frequent posters. Images often work faster with the brain than words do. They also give you a better impression of the type of person you are talking with. As a result, we incorporated Avatars into our comment system. We encourage everyone to sign-up at Gravatar.com with the email address you use here to post your comments with. Upload an image to represent yourself with, and give people something to associate with you.
Threaded Comments
Because comments are a huge part of the new Geekshow Entertainment community, we were happy to implement multiple tools that improve that functionality. Avatars are great, but there is more out there to take advantage of. The other big tool we put into place was Comment Threading. This means that comments can have multiple levels, and become individual conversations in themselves. Users can reply to specific posts to make points, counter-points, or anything that pertains to something specific. The current theme will support up to 3 levels of threading. That is to say that you can have a comment, which has a reply, which in turn has a reply. This should in theory make conversations a lot more interactive and interesting. Again, we encourage users to take advantage of this ability. To make things easier, comment replies are enhanced with Ajax. Which means when you decide to reply to a comment, the comment box should come to you. Then you type in your comment, and it’s posted, that simple.
The other tools at use in the new site design range from behind the scenes features that improve the ability to write efficiently to other features that have been previously mentioned. Like the ability to view an image how you want to view it, and navigate the site how you want to navigate it.
Putting it All Together, Working Out the Kinks
Nothing can ever be perfect, unfortunately. So the design process became a 3+ month long journey in figuring out what worked and what didn’t. Up until literally the last minute, things have been changing. Colors were tweaked, images were re-positioned, and bugs were fixed. With the recent influx of writers for the site, we got our own little merry band of beta testers. They have done a fantastic job of spotting problems we may never have seen before launch otherwise. Ultimately, the best way to find problems is to put the work out there, and let people break it.
It is with a great amount of pride, and an equal amount of relief that we present you with the ever evolving and never done – “Geekshow Entertainment”. We hope you find many new things to love about the site, and less annoying problems. But if you do find those problems, we can work together to find a solution. By all means, any bugs, typos, etc should be referred to Saberj, or published here in the comments. Enjoy, and be sure to let us know what you think!
Do You Like the New Site Design?
- Yes (73%, 93 Votes)
- Not as much as the last design (19%, 24 Votes)
- No (8%, 11 Votes)
Total Voters: 128
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Gallery of Images
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- Threaded Comments
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- Multiple tabs for extra options
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- Geekshow Entertainment Logo
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- An image representating the post
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- The previous site design
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- The new look is much brighter and cleaner
-
- Gallery of Images
-
- Avatars in use
-
- 2 Column Display
-
- White, Red, and Gold are the new main site colors
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Merry Christmas from Geekshow. Let me know what you guys think. Now, I’m off to slave away at making sure I get everything working right….
Liking the new design a lot. Very nice.
Wow. It’s great. The design is unique & cool.
Uhh im not too sure. It looks too clean and too functional. I like the messed up darker look more. Never a fan of white when its just plain without something arty/unique going on.
As far as complaints go, that’s one I’m not sure how to take.
Still, I’ve never quite seen a site look similar to this one, so I personally think it’s still quite a bit unique. But I did a lot of the slave labor, so I’m biased.
I didn’t mean its not unique, i meant another word but its too early and couldnt come up with it. I think i still haven’t got over tv.com turning white.
The only white site I liked had some weird flash thing going on and nice artwork at the top which was cool. But I havent seen a site like this one…it does have a geekshow vibe..and may grow on me….i’ll see. At least i dont have to click a million clicks to get see what I want.
If it makes you feel any better, I don’t like the new tv.com look either. I am fond of darker themes. But light has its advantages.
Anyway, change always takes some getting used to. Hope you find some things that you enjoy with the new site look
So is anyone else having trouble logging in?
Using the log in up top of the home page, it comes up with “Oops! We can’t find what you are looking for! Please use the search bar up top to look for it!” when i try to log in
Fixed. Thanks for the heads up. Still a few bugs to iron out…
also clicking on the Gravatar link opens a page back to geekshow….
Also fixed now.
and it won’t let me vote either…. “Please choose a valid poll answer.” …….i think it doesn’t like me….
But I’m not seeing a problem with this issue. What choice did you try to select? Might be an issue with a certain answer, although each of them has at least 1 vote…
well i WAS trying for “Yes”
then i tried the other two answers and it still came up with that pop up
i’ll try logging in n seeing if that works
nup, still can’t log in! i is doomed….
Do me a favor. Clear your cache, refresh the page. See if that helps either issue. Are you still having the SAME login issue, or a different one?
It still says “Oops blah blah”
also if i “reply” to your post, it doesn’t kick it in like it does to yours, is it supposed to do that? I thought there was supposed to be up to 3 levels
Yeah, it’s supposed to. Let me try some things, I’ll get back to you…
Login is now fixed. I don’t think that will correct the other problems though.
…..so about that…. its saying invalid username… do i need to re-register?
The database is still the same, so any users that existed before should still exist. That being said, I don’t see a “munchkins” listed. You registered as that before?
munchYkins… has a y in the middle…
it’s how i registered for the forums, im assuming it’s the same??
man i’m just trouble LOL sorry
Ah, no. The forum is a separate piece of software that will be getting a re-visit before too much longer. So yeah, you would need to register for the site itself.
Hmm, well it’s different. I think i like it.
Nobody has replied to a comment yet. Please let me know if you are having issues with that. But if you are, first try holding down Ctrl while clicking the reload button. If that doesn’t work, try clearing your browser cache, and see if that works. If not, then let me know what browser/operating system you are using.
This is a reply to your comment. Seems to work fine for me.
Seems to work fine for me to. i am using firefox on ubuntu (linux)
…..about that…. clicking register sends me to the Oops page too…
Out of curiosity, I logged out and tried to get to the registration page. It also gave me an “oops” page instead.
That should be fixed now too. Thanks again.
BTW, I love the new site design. It’s slick looking, and much more functional than the last design was. I like having all the different category links at the top.
poo! i figured how to get to the register page, and forgot the .au of my email and now it won’t let me register…. is there a timeout that the site has so i can re-try with my username?
I deleted the old one. Give it a try again.
woo hoo i am logged in! i can also vote, and im “replying” to your post, so hopefully it works
Im using Firefox with XP btw
oh also, iPhone view of the website is great!
Bothersome. That means something is amiss with replying and voting while not logged in. Is this working for anyone?
i could eventually vote without logging in (though when i could not vote i also couldnt see the results)
but i couldn’t “reply” while not logged in
I was also having the voting issue when trying to do it from the sidebar, but I didn’t have an issue when i clicked on the poll at the bottom of the article.
voting didn’t work anywhere for me, it did finally in the side bar though
*thumbs up* I heartily approve of this. Much easier to navigate, I love the division of articles and podcasts.
I have verified that comment replies do not work right when you are not logged in. I’ll be trying to figure out why…
I like the new site. I do miss the dark colours of the old site, but this site is more functional.
I can’t get my user name at Gravatar. I have used the same name everywhere as it is my actual nickname. If I change it for gravatar it won’t effect my posts here, correct?
Gravatar just cares about your email address, not your username. As long as you keep the same email address at both places, it will work fine.
Thanks! I figured but you never know.
Nice look for the site guys!
Thanks for all the impressions guys. Keep them coming. A lot of work can still be done on issues that people have. Obviously if your issue is with the overall look, that really can’t be helped currently. But I still want to know the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Also, everyone is looking slick with their Gravatars. I hope that all frequent users will eventually add them.
I don’t like change
I do. I have a jar full of it in my floor. Helps when a big trip comes along and you have a bunch saved.
I like change. I like Gravitars. I like the new site. I don’t like Yes Man. I do like sarcasm.
I like the change as well….is my gravatar showing?
It;s interesting, I’m not used to it yet, it will take time to adjust
I’m liking it so far. Its got a totally different feel. from what was said in the article I think the changes you guys were going for worked out.
I like it, very cool.
But where is this Gravatars thing everyone is talking about?
Read the second paragraph under “The Tools That Improve Your Visit”
Thank you
cool
I’m sticking with no Gravatar.
I prefer to retain the ability to have my email address generate an automatic avatar on other sites (even those that can also use gravatar, like mine), and to do so on a per-site basis (so I can’t just set the gravatar to a wavatar or whatever).
If I set up gravatar, AFAIK the only way to get that ability back for that email would be to … disassociate the gravatar account and the email address (or delete the gravatar images or whatever), which rather defeats the purpose of setting one up.
Or just use a different email address for sites that don’t have the random gravatar.
I’m loving the new stuff!
Who ever drew all the stuff should get a prize!! But really, I like the new look, It’s fresh and clean. the old site was kinda dull and i think that if the internet had a smell, it would have smelled like old moldy shoes left down in the basement…
but the new site taste like STRAWBERRIES!
Did you see your name down there in the footer of the site, BTW?
I did! Thank you so much! I hope that people will take a look at my site now and comment too!
I’m having the weirdest trouble logging in through wordpress. I tried requesting a new password but every time I do that it says ‘invalid entry’
The login is case sensitive, so make sure you are typing your login name correctly. If you still need help, I can manually reset passwords if need be.
I feel like such a dorkus- that’s exactly what it was. All good now
What’s Wonder Woman saying in your avatar Sunshine?
“Va all inferno!”
^^”Go to hell!” in Italian. It’s a panel from Alan Moore’s ‘For the Man Who Has Everything.” But I could on;y find a copy online in Italian. lol.
YAY! new site! Just to let you all know… I broke a bottle of champagne over my computer the first time I opened it. Now my mouse doesn’t work so well.
Replies made by users not logged in should now work as intended. Thanks to everyone that helped test that out for me. I’m still not entirely sure what the deal was with the polls, as you should be able to use it if you are not logged in. It relies entirely on IP addresses and cookies.
Oh Ben’s reading a comic in the new art… Lol I thought he was playing some sort of Gameboy but Ben doesn’t play videogames… comics make sense
He has or had a 360, I’m pretty sure. But yeah, I’ve never known him to talk much about it, so I assume that’s just a minor thing to do for him.
It took awhile but yeah, hat in hand I bow my head and say “Sir’s, this new design has grown on me, love the art work and the layout.”
damn you all and your positive comments. Makes me look like a bitch now. I will never conform! no matter how much im secretly starting to like it.
Woo, I’m used to it now, it’s pretty darn cool and I have a gravatar. Now all you have to do is guess which one is me.
Im going to go ahead and guess your the guy in the photo next to your name (Jack being a guys name, unless its short for Jackie or something).
Randy, is there a way to keep track of new comments?
‘Recent comments’ on the right side of the main page only shows the last few.
could there be a list that tells you that post X has Y new comments since you last checked it? Then when you click it, it disappears from the list.
Or if that’s not possible, maybe the number at the top right of a post on the main page, show the number of new comments in addition to the number of total comments.
Or maybe there’s already an existing method that I’m missing?
Because this, I think, is crucial to creating real discussions, that can last longer than just one or two days.
Nice. Love the new Layout. I’ll have to stop reading the site on an RSS reader.
Happy Heart Day ,