New Site: Landing Page

One of the issues with the current site (that I know deters new users from the site), is the lack of a landing site. It's a large enough image, so I'm linking to the image rather than having it showing here.

First, the landing page design. Some notes:
- Under Latest Games, you'll be able to type in a system, and if it's in GP, it'll show you the latest games from that system. On first load, it'll just show you the 3 newest games.
- I know the Signup section should have something above it, but I'm not quite sure what. Maybe just a colored bar?
- When you sign up on the home page, that section will slide up, showing another short form where the user can pick a username, a ReCAPTCHA, and an input asking where they heard about GP. I'm thinking dropping the typical "repeat your password" or just asking for an email and username on the main form and the password/confirm password on the second form.
- When not logged in, the user icon on the right side of the menu instead will be a red sign up link.
- Clicking on the user icon at the right of the menu opens up a secondary menu.
- When you scroll down, the menu will collapse a bit.
- I'm wondering if its overkill, but I think I want the icons next to What is Play-by-Post? will be at about 75% opacity with one of them randomly coming to full opacity for a bit. The positioning is the best I could think of; if you're better with positioning, help me with that?
- The Partners section will slide though all of GP's partners.
- You can see in the main landing vs the secondary images, I'm testing orange (like on the current site) vs red headers. What do you think? I'm leaning to the red headers, but I worry it'll be too much red on the site. I'm terrible with color palettes...
- I need Testimonials!

Thoughts?

My opinions, for what they are worth:

Either orange or red looks good. I think consistency is what will matter the most. I suspect red is more versatile (it looks better on white for example). However I am a no-art-skill person so take that with a grain of salt.

Would recent / active threads be. Ire compelling than recent games? So frequently a recent game will be full quickly, especially if it's D&D. It could be discouraging to come by tFor the first time and feel locked out of a game. Side note - I wonder if a game feature where you could reserve N (default 1) slot for a user who isn't in any games, or has a create date of less than 30 days could be handy. It could enable an experienced GM to get a group going and add a new player when one shows up?

I like the icons. As you get more systems it may not be a scalable UI/presentation however. Some form of rotating/sliding set of images might be necessary. Sorta auto paginate, if you will.

Thanks for the thoughts falryx.

A landing page is meant to be a place for people who are logged out and haven't been to the site before to check things out and to try to entice them to join. Active threads wouldn't be on here, as after consideration, I figured if someone came to GP not knowing much about the site, they'd first be interested in the games, then the community. Active/recent threads will still be on the home page (where you'll go if you're logged in), and I'm thinking of removing "Latest Games" from the home page.

You bring up a good point about discouraging and feeling locked out of a game. I can have the latest games section on the landing just show games with slots open, but that may result in an out of date game showing up there, so I'm mixed on that. I'm not a fan of a reservation system, as it'd unfair to the GMs and active players too. I think that'd most likely just have to be tackled by increased user activity. More people means more games which means less chance of lockout. However, there is probably something mechanical we can do, maybe a flag on games mentioning they'd take on a new player even if full?

I don't plan on increasing the number of game logos on the landing; just showing off the most popular. It's about 1/3 the number of systems GP currently has up, but just the ones I think would be most eye catching.

Not much input other than it looks nice.

I like it!

No real input, but that looks great.

My responses:
- Buttons should be red, bars should be orange.
- There's very little information above the fold; I'd like to see a mock-up that had the "What is Play-by-Post?" swapped with the "Latest Games" section, or at least a bit more information. It might work better, or it might not. You've got to keep what you want people to see above the fold.
- The "Search Systems" capability you describe sounds great, but it almost requires that you build a field for GMs to write in the name of the system they're running, rather than just "Custom." No one is going to type in a search for "Custom," and every RPG has its share of devotees looking to play that game.
- above the signup section should be a call to action, such as "Start playing today!" or "Get Started" or "Register now!"
- Questions: the user icon in the upper left (Edit: RIGHT, I meant "upper right"): will that become the user's portrait when logged in? Will it indicate the presence of new messages without a mouseover or a click to expand the pulldown menu?
- Latest games: I think this should show the three most recent games in different systems; you probably want to avoid the landing page displaying multiple games in one system (if they want to see if there are multiple games in a given system, users will search for it) - the quick glance should give a sense of the breadth of options.
- There's a bunch of proofreading needed in the text. I'd point out the various spots you might want to clean up/correct, but I suspect that none of the copy is intended as final.

My testimonial:
"My schedule has made playing a regular face-to-face game impossible, and every time I try to join a drop-in game like Adventurer's League, there's no room. I'd tried play-by-post and play-by-email, and the games always dwindled and died before they got very far. It had felt like gaming was gone from my life until I found Gamers' Plane. Now I'm part of a great community of dedicated, fun, and passionate players and game masters, and I can play RPGs every day. With Gamers' Plane, I feel like a gamer again."

I considered this as well. I was thinking, how many people are going to randomly hit Gamers' Plane? It seems like a site that people will find because they're looking for it, which is why I opted to have the latest games right at the top.
Custom won't show up on the landing page search, but you're right! I'm currently working on allowing GMs to choose what character sheets to allow into their game, which means I'll be able to allow GMs to add their own systems.
I agree; I'm not great that thinking of that :p
The user icon will be their portrait yes, and the small message icon that is there in the mockup will only show if there is an unread message waiting.
On page load before searching a system? I like that idea; I'll consider it.
Yah, I just threw it together quickly, but I always appreciate a second pair of eyes.
Thank you for the kind words!

After some thought, and looking at when this project will actually end up being developed, I've updated the landing. I've changed the top section to show latest games and most popular characters, and moved the signup link below. Clicking the signup link will slide the game/character content out.

The reason for this, is by the time I end up launching this, I'll most likely have the public character creation system up. I'll end up having a link under Popular Characters to create a character.

Now the problem: It doesn't look good/right. If any of you guys have design experience or knowledge, I'd love a hand here. Maybe I'm trying to do too much? Should I drop the popular character idea entirely, and just have a section to create a new character? The idea is the section should have stuff that would make people want to join up with Gamers' Plane, and there are 4 items I can think of, but without stats, I'm not sure which would be best: PbP games, store characters online, find characters in the library, the community. Thoughts?

I'm going to bump this thread, in part because I'm currently working on implementing the header and footer, so I can start using the new GP logo. As always, I'd love to hear feedback and suggestions, specially if you're more design oriented. Right now, I'll be adding the header/footer with mostly the content the current header/footer has, as I'm nowhere near the public/popular characters functionality.

I'm about 50-60% of the way done with the new landing page. As you may see in the design, I have a spot at the bottom for testimonials. If you're willing, email me (contact@gamersplane.com) a short blurb on your thoughts of GP, something I can throw onto the site, along with what you'd like to be referenced by, your name or username. Keep it to 50 words if possible. I'll be displaying 2 at the bottom of the page, and if I get more than 2, I'll set it up so it shuffles through them.

If you send me a blurb and I don't use it, I'm sorry. I'll try to respond to each one that's send to me.