December 7 approaches. That's the official date that WinCustomize 2K5 replaces the old WinCustomize.com.

We still have features to implement of course. But hopefully things are coming down to the final stretch. So what do we have left to do before launch? Lots of things but here are some things we're struggling with:

• The home page. We are still worried that the home page is too busy. Too intimidating to a casual user. Should we get rid of the right column? Or left column? Should we have the newest additions be replace by a mini-thumbnail view of some recent or popular skins? Should we combine the daily shot and the featured skin together? Or is it fine as it is?
• The Colors. We're not sold on the colors of the new site.  Tangerine for the home page? Not sure about that. Is it too bright? Maybe. But I've received zero concepts of what the site should look like.  Feel free to post your own mockup of what the home page should look like (use www.imageshack.us to upload your image and then link to it in the comments here).
• The Gallery.  I think the new gallery tab should display thumbnails and not just the names of the skins. It's too texty I think. What do you think?
• Newest. On the skins we think it should say things like <skin name> for <product>. Such as Royale for LogonStudio. Just because experts know what the icon represents doesn't mean the average person will. Also maybe we should list the 20 newest ones instead of 10 since we have the room? What do you think we should do on teh newest page?
• Popular. Same sort of thing on popular. Should list the top 20 in each category. Skins should again say Project Onx for WindowBlinds.
• Articles. This is pretty much what we want out of this. Would like to see an index list option that displays the article name, sub-header, author, and date in a nice clean way.
• Forums. This area will need some more work. We eventually plan to put in moderator suggested bookmarks for popular sub-categories.  For instance, OS Customization would have WindowBlinds, Widgets, IconPackager, and a few other bookmarks so that people can instantly get into those areas.
• Software. This is pretty much what we had in mind though we would like to make use of Betanews or Downlolad.com's RSS feed to display the latest/greatest stuff in those areas as part of the forum.
• Sites. This is pretty much what we had in mind. Except it needs to have at the top a way for people who don't have a personal page to get their own personal page.
• Store. Still is still in development.
• Library. The Next and Last buttons should be bigger and be of the style like you see for the comments button and download button.

So what are some of the highlights? What is our goal? Well, first off, we want to get the advocacy system working. It still has some kinks (referrals from WinCustomize itself count as an advocacy point but that'll be cleared up soon enough. 

Basically the top non-Stardockian advocate each month will get some goodies sent to them. An advocate is someone who goes out onto other sites and links to one of their skins, themes, walls, articles, or whatever.  So if I go out and tell people to check out my RSS widget then every time somone goes to that link it'll give me an advocacy point. And if you click on the referral button, you can see who is linking to it.

Now what about non-skinners? No problem, you'll be able to recommend a skin.  For instance, I'm playing a lot of Halo 2 right now. So as someone who has a personal page, I can go over to TSF's Halo 2. At the bottom, I can "Recommend" the skin for users of my personal page (http://frogboy.wincustomize.com).  So now it adds it to MY recommendations page. I can then go over to the Halo 2 forums and if I happen to see  a discussion that it might make sense to bring it up, and give people this link to my personal page's recommendation link: Halo 2 WMP skin. The Skin author gets an advocacy point and I get an advocacy point. But this way, I've "advocated" the wonderful world of skinning to people who may not have ever thought of skinning their media player. 

I think the advocacy feature is going to be a big deal down the line. It also helps that skinners can actually see who is linking to their skins or their website.  If you are a WC subscriber or someone with high access, you can create your own personal page or you can just link to your own skin.

Which is another big thing we've done.  Compare THIS to THIS. Ignore the really long description. Look how much cleaner the new version is.  The old way was ugly to link to because it had too much extra junk in there.  The new site has a mcuh cleaner display.

Or check this out: Compare the way Stardock linked to a skin section: Old WindowBlinds library link. And New WindowBlinds library link. Note that on the right side you see the top authors, skins and forum activity relating to WindowBlinds.  We'll be adding tutorials per section as well shortly.

Speaking of tutorials...If you go to the articles page, you can see that there is now a tutorials area at the bottom left.  It's also one of the channels (or will be) in the Articles tab.  Users can create tutorials now on pretty much anything they want and it will get associated with the proper section. Tutorials can be on skinning or on Photoshop or whatever you want.  So hopefully we'll be able to help users a great deal mroe this way.

Speed.  Hopefully you notice the speed increase. This is all using the same hardware. The only difference is the underlying code which should be much faster.  It will actually get faster as more people use this site instead of WinCustomzie thanks to caching. The problem with caching, however, is that we can't really have per user skins of the site. We can only do it globally. We don't plan to change this in the near future. Sorry. We think speed of site is a higher priority for now.

New Sections.. We plan to add sections for several new programs in the coming weeks. We are de-highlighting certain less active categories including NextStart, ObjectBar, and Dashboard. If more activity occurs in those areas, we'll re-highlight them.  They still exist in the general gallery though, you just have to click on the more button. We currently have 19 highlighted sections. The WindowBlinds section has been renamed Visual styles.  Let us know what you think of that title change.

So that's where we're at.  We need your help in feedback. Please be constructive in any criticism since bear in mind, we are spending massive time and effort on this. Be gentle.   And have fun!