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What's Wrong With WinCustomize?
Yes, we want your complaints!
Tuesday, February 12, 2008 by Zoomba | Discussion: WinCustomize News
This March, WinCustomize turns 7. For seven years the site has grown in terms of visitors, bandwidth, quantity of skins etc. And the site itself has gone through several revisions in that period. Today, we're on the 5th iteration of WinCustomize, and on the whole it still bears a striking resemblance to that first site launched back in 2001. For good or ill, a lot of the decisions that went into that first site determine direction to this day.
While there have been a lot of improvements, there are probably a lot of places where we've failed to meet expectations. WinCustomize 2007 was focused on a solid foundation, code that was stable and expandable. Now we're in a position to focus on the UI and the presentation more, to improve the user experience dramatically. This is where you come in.
About a year ago, we sought your opinions on how Stardock had failed the community. Your comments on what you felt we could be doing better has helped us make a lot of changes and improvements to our products. Well, we want to try that again, only this time specifically with WinCustomize. We want to know what doesn't work, what sucks, what you hate, what you want fixed about WinCustomize. We are looking for very specific critiques of the site, it's functionality, layout, user interface etc.
This thread is about critiques, it's not about defending the site, it's not about telling us how much you like the site. If we are going to improve the site in the future, we need a very clear picture of what is broken and needs to be fixed.
A week from today, I will be going through the comments on this thread and compiling a master list of complaints and critiques. We will use this list when we start the requirements and design work for the next WC update later this year.
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Reply #2 Tuesday, February 12, 2008 3:00 PM
Reply #3 Tuesday, February 12, 2008 3:01 PM
I think the support forum should be heavily moderated as to how issues should be posted. And it should be made clear before posting on a sticky thread at the top. For example ,
Type of issue:
What version of the software
etc etc
Any other threads are deleted with a note to see the sticky for format
That way you should be able to get better quality bug reports and the forums are not clogged with whiny threads like 'I get black borders on my Windows , WB sucks , wah wah wah !!!! '
Reply #4 Tuesday, February 12, 2008 3:01 PM
The top navigation is "almost" the same but not quite. Side bar navigation would be nice too.
The same functionality for author names in teh forums in the galleries (PM, view profile, etc.)
Allow some skin-ablility. Post the CSS for the UI so that skinners can upload to a WC theme gallery or jsut create one for their own use.
Reply #5 Tuesday, February 12, 2008 3:04 PM
Reply #6 Tuesday, February 12, 2008 3:05 PM
huh?
The title is "What's Wrong With WinCustomize?" not "what's wrong with WindowBlinds"
Reply #7 Tuesday, February 12, 2008 3:14 PM
Reply #8 Tuesday, February 12, 2008 3:16 PM
Reply #9 Tuesday, February 12, 2008 3:17 PM
Seconded. Maybe a simple 10 pixel drop could do it?
Have to agree with Koasati but, think that option should be for an add-on for subscribers only.
Reply #10 Tuesday, February 12, 2008 3:17 PM
Reply #11 Tuesday, February 12, 2008 3:18 PM
For such design heavy experts, I'm amazed and dismayed that such a simple thing is not acted on.
Reply #12 Tuesday, February 12, 2008 3:20 PM
Reply #13 Tuesday, February 12, 2008 3:22 PM
Reply #14 Tuesday, February 12, 2008 3:23 PM
1. guestbook dates on personal pages are wacky.
2. Unable to delete entries from guestbook
3. When I do a skin update I get a message saying "because of your access level, the skin is auto-approved. Your skin will be up in aprox. 1 min."
I know this isn't true!
Reply #15 Tuesday, February 12, 2008 3:28 PM
~ ~ may be it could be a bit faster to load pages ...
Reply #16 Tuesday, February 12, 2008 3:34 PM
We need a Personal Favorites page (like a My Yahoo-type page), where we can define what new skins or themes are shown (by type, date, popularity, etc), along with any new articles posted in the past (however many) days. I would also like that page to not be naviagted away from (have any link clicked form it open in a new tab). I know this would personally save me much time and many clicks each time I visit the site. Maybe we already have that and I just don't know how to sue it.
As for actual complaints, I have to agree with the Star Ratings drop-down; it gets in the way or causes me to start downloading (again) a skin I'm rating more often that not.
The text editing for forums and comments needs to be udpated. There is a great deal of good code out there that would allow the formatting of these things without the [tag]'s. It's a little ole-skool. And an in-line spell-checker for posts would be great as well (maybe we could get it to automatically Capitalize and punctuate everything that needs to be, as few things bother me more than people who write in all lower-case and neevr use a comma or period...).
Other than that, nothing else comes to mind.
Reply #17 Tuesday, February 12, 2008 3:45 PM
Reply #18 Tuesday, February 12, 2008 3:49 PM
Reply #20 Tuesday, February 12, 2008 3:57 PM
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Reply #1 Tuesday, February 12, 2008 2:57 PM