Some thoughts on the new WinCustomize
Thursday, March 25, 2010 by Frogboy | Discussion: WinCustomize News
We had planned to launch the new WinCustomize today (the 9th birthday of WinCustomize.com) but we had go back to the existing site after we ran into a lot of DNS issues that we’ll work out during the subsequent week or so.
I expect to launch to be as smooth at the launch of the current site which means, not very smooth at all. 
That said, let me walk you through the things we’re excited about in the new site and solicit feedback on what things you guys would like to see.
The Main Page
NEW:
The new main page is much cleaner and yet, provides access to a lot more useful stuff.
From the page you can access with a single click:
- virtually every gallery,
- the featured skins,
- the top skins (today’s favorites, 30 days, all time)
- top skinners (today’s favorites, 30 days, all time)
- featured master skins,
- newest skin,
- latest news,
- newest master skins
- recent forum posts
- featured articles
By contrast, the current site lets you get:
- virtually every gallery
- featured skin
- today’s favorites
- top master skins
- featured articles
- latest news
- recent forum posts
- poll
Of course, to get to those 8 things you need this much space:
OLD:
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s amazing that the old WinCustomize doesn’t even display the newest skins on the home page. It only displays the top 3 most popular skins of the day. You have to scroll down to see what’s new on the forums. If you want to see the most popular skins of the last 30 days you have to go through several steps on the old site.
The Gallery
NEW:
What I really like about the new gallery is that it’s now very easy to access context-relevant information like the top skinners in a given gallery and the most popular ones without having to do special sorting options.
By contrast, the right side was dominated by a parade of little icons for getting to the other galleries (on the new site, just mouse over explore just like on every page to get elsewhere). As a result, users were bombarded with a LOT of stuff, most of which was not relevant.
Skin View
NEW:
When you click on a given skin, you now has quick access to other skins made by that skinner. It’s easy to just go to the next skin in the gallery as well as an intuitive way to get back to the list of skins in that gallery (before you would have to hit the back arrow in your browser every time).
You still get instant access to all the other galleries and forum posts and such because of the universal mouse-over menu at the top.
By contrast…
OLD:
First off, note how much more screen space is needed to present less information. If you want to go to the next skin in the gallery, you have to hit back and then click on the next one. There’s no info on what other skins this author has done. There’s no easy list to see what’s popular in this skin gallery from here. The thumbnail is blurry and hard to view. Big walls of text.
SEARCH
NEW:
Click on the drop down to pick a particular gallery or search the entire site.
OLD:
Pray it works.
So those are some of the highlights of the new site. Under the covers, once the server stuff is fully configured, it should be vastly faster too but like with the old site, it will probably take a few weeks to weed out various critical paths that need to be tweaked.
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Reply #2 Thursday, March 25, 2010 6:51 PM
I like the larger thumbs and access to your other work. 
Reply #4 Thursday, March 25, 2010 7:06 PM
i like the new site. hopefully, the bugs are worked out soon.
Reply #7 Thursday, March 25, 2010 9:05 PM
Happy Birthday WinCustomize!
While it hasn't won me over completely yet,I have to admit there is a lot to like about the new site. Keep on truckin'...just watch those speed bumps.
Reply #9 Thursday, March 25, 2010 10:02 PM
Reply #10 Thursday, March 25, 2010 10:13 PM
Reply #11 Thursday, March 25, 2010 10:45 PM
Reply #12 Thursday, March 25, 2010 11:06 PM
Reply #13 Friday, March 26, 2010 12:20 AM
4 sure.
Reply #14 Friday, March 26, 2010 3:13 AM
Reply #15 Friday, March 26, 2010 3:35 AM
Reply #16 Friday, March 26, 2010 11:35 AM
Perhaps I was doing something wrong but there was on thing I would like to know if it can be done perhaps for this new site. When ever I browsed the skins for, say, Windowblinds, I had the option of only seeing those Vista and Windows 7 compatible. I also had the option of sorting by user rating. The only problem was I could not do both at the same time, if I did the compatible one I did not always get the ones best rated first, if I tried to sort by ratings I would get everything and could not filter the Windows Vista and 7 only.
Can this be done on the new site? Or the old one for that matter.
Reply #20 Saturday, March 27, 2010 8:36 PM
well damn, brings back that old community feeling. thanks Brad.
one thing, seems petty but, I see top skinner this and top skinner that. what about those of us that are not top skinners. I'm not really concerned by my ratings or even if someone downloads the skin or not. and even having said that, it is nice to see the number of downloads achieved. seems we're getting regulated to the back burner.
oh, still like the old to be site, but I'll get over it.
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Reply #1 Thursday, March 25, 2010 6:45 PM
Looking good for sure Brad!