[unclearthur]

In showcase/project page, it doesn't seem like there is a link to a person's profile who did the project. After seeing a nice project, I always want to check what else the person makes so it would be nice if there is the link (I wonder if it is actually planned to be added and just not there yet).

The following picture is where I'm talking about.
View attachment 3852993

Agree with this. The comments in the projects section have links to the commentor, but no links to the original project poster.

 

[unclearthur]

Bug report. On my browser (Edge, WIndows 10) the "Enable Push Notifications" popup is persistent, can't be dismissed.

 

[unclearthur]

Congratulations on the new update: I am sure it has been a lot of work.

My principal comment is that the Projects page - probably the page I frequent the most - is not very attractive on desktop, IMHO. Too much blank space. I would suggest:
Bigger thumbnails - WW is a very visual topic
Two columns - decrease wasted space. Can switch to one column for mobile assuming the site is responsive.

Also the existing thumbnails are fuzzy; compare the thumbnail for this project to its actual page:

Multi-Location sign post

Multi-Location sign post

www.lumberjocks.com

Main page picture looks good; thumbnail is dowdy. A fuzzy thumbnail is a poor advertisement for a post. Maybe resolution is too low ....something wonky there.

On the detailed Projects page, suggest dropping the "More in Projects" on the RHS (desktop). Just clutter unrelated to the post as far as I can tell. Ideal place for info, links about the project creator.

The comments section is very stretched out vertically. Makes for too much scrolling I would say. Possibly smaller thumbnails? On a largish monitor I'm seeing less than 4 single sentence comments per page, pre scrolling. Thats ununusual for user generated content - look at Quora, Reddit - I think it needs to be tightened up.

People want their projects to look great, so I think effort to make this part of the site attractive is worth it.

 

[unclearthur]

Can the resolution on the showcase thumbnails be adjusted so that they don't scale up? They all look kind of blurry and skewed because of the change of aspect ratio.

View attachment 3853178

Agree! #1 Major issue I'd say. Projects page should look spectacular inviting people to scroll through - but looks dowdy.

 

[unclearthur]

I hadn't really paid that much attention to dead space. I just took a look at the Projects page and I sure see what you mean. Then I turned off my ad blocker and there was no more dead space!

Yeah ..... ad width 300 px; project photo width 150 px.

For me the major downfall of the update is the projects page, which looks like crap. It should be the page inspiring people to post their projects and come to the site to see other people's projects. Most people take care in posting nice images of their projects - this page should look great, but looks terrible. Its not just all the scrolling, the thumbnails are too small, are cut off due to aspect ratios and look poor quality / resolution.

Curious to know the click through rate on individual projects old site vs new site. I bet it goes down.

Woodworking is a very visual subject; can't treat it like a forum about non-visual subjects.

Example: look at Lee Valley Tool's new site (maybe 2 years old) - its all about great images.

 

[unclearthur]

I would agree, I would love to see something more like this for the Showcase/Project section (This was done by almost exclusively modifying css styles in dev tools as a quick example/POC)
View attachment 3853889

I think that would be an improvement, and just having the thumbs rectangular (rather than square) as you have done helps, as most original photos are rectangular.

But I think going with large photos, really showing each project, might look terrific. Its more scrolling, but as you scroll you are really seeing projects in a much richer way. Instagram for instance displays photos 300x300; Facebook 500x250. People like big pictures.

 

[unclearthur]

I agree that they need a better way to organize and show reviews. It might actually be better just to have a single review forum instead of all of the subcategories and just rely on tags and searches to find the appropriate categories. That way, the Review forum would simply show all reviews chronologically. I get the idea of the subcategories for organization but the unintended consequence is that you have to visit each category to see if new reviews have been added (and you missed when viewing new postings).

Agree .... personally, on the old site if I was looking for a review of something in particular I would just search which worked fine. Occasionally I'd visit the Reviews page just to see if there was a review of something new / interesting but not searching thru categories for that. And not important enough to me to start figuring out how to filter / search for it.

 

[unclearthur]

..... new projects given their second class status in the new world. The more I interact with this new software, the more convinced I am that the artificial difference between “projects” (or “showcases”) from discussions is a mistake, and not a small one.

Agree ..... I keep visiting the main "Projects" page to see if they have fixed it but it remains .......horrible. Can't imagine someone scrolling down that page and being inspired to click on the little blurry chopped off images on the left. Should be the most important page of the site.

 

[unclearthur]

Seems as there is something wrong with the process of creating the thumbnails....

Yeah, cameras generally don't take square pictures, so creating square thumbnails from rectangular pictures isn't likely to get good results.

It is a bit bizarre what they are doing. If you look at this project you can see that the original main image is 645 px wide and 401 px tall.

The thumbnail they create can be seen on its own here, - it is the same image scaled down to 150 px wide x 94 tall.

But then they want to display that as a square, so they crop out the sides to make it square. But now it is 94 px by 94 px. So they stretch the image to get back to 150 x 150 px (the final display size). The stretching adds the blurriness.

In the first step they should probably be scaling the shortest (not longest) side of the image to 150 px, then cropping to make it a square 150 px by 150 px. No stretching needed and no blurriness.

But why do the thumbnail thing at all? Why not just show a large, original aspect ratio, image of the project? The width can scale based on the size of the screen (easy on a responsive website) subject to whatever maximum you want (e.g. 500 px). Let people really show off their project and let visitors to the projects page really see the projects and decide which ones they want to click and see more of.

For me the projects page is a complete failure on the new site. Woodworking is about projects. And the main projects page makes projects look like crap. Fixable but ........ nothing seems to be happening. Not interested in visiting that page or posting things to it as-is.

 

[unclearthur]

Is there no concern that activity is so low now? For example, there have been only four projects posted in the past 24 hours with a total of just 13 comments. Remember the Good Ol' days?!!! GET OFF MY LAWN!!!

A drop-off in project postings (and especially project pageviews) wouldn't be surprising. Who wants to post a project that looks like this:

when it will be displayed like this:

Just one example.

With respect to repeating concerns ...... at least it gives an idea of how many people feel the same way. And I don't recall any of the Mods really commenting on potential changes to the appearance of the Projects page

 

[unclearthur]

• If you do a search for "chair" and select Projects in Prefixes, and leave the Categories blank or choose All categories, you will get 9 results. All 9 results have been added since the software change on 9/20/22.
• If you do a search for "chair" and leave Prefixes blank or choose Any, and in Categories choose Projects, you will get 500 results.

Thats really really bad UI - you specifically select Projects and it hides 95% of the projects.

 

[unclearthur]

Yeah, the main project page is a complete disaster, and I haven't heard a word about any changes to it. Zero motivation to post anything there or look through other people's projects (which was my #1 reason for visiting LJ).

You need big, clear pictures in their original aspect ratios. Then projects will look good. Its not that complicated. But I guess it requires customization from the standard forum software, and they don't want to do it because of cost / maintenance etc.......

 

[unclearthur]

Not only smaller - also blurry. And unreasonably small.
The purpose of a project preview is to understand the project well enough to see if it is one of interest. Clicking on a project should be to understand in depth - not to figure out what the project is.

Exactly. People don't want to click on a blurry thumb to see what the project is. They want to know what the project is and then click on it if it is interesting to them. On the old site I might click on 1 / 50 projects to see the details. Am I going to click on 50 blurry thumbnails to see if there is an interesting project? No.

I was on a woodworking sub-forum on a social media site the other day. The discussions were not interesting (not a LJ level of expertise to learn from!) but each thread [project] started with a bright big picture. You could just scroll through the threads and see all the projects in full resolution easily. Its not good when a generic social media site can display woodworking projects better than LJ.

Just show full screen width pictures, natural aspect ratio with a title above the pic and the creators name as the legend, one project on top of each other. With the quality of work on LJ, it would look great, and it is so simple. Should really be the home page of the site. Visitors would get there and say Wow, I want to be able to make stuff like that. Regular users can enjoy each others work without 50 clicks.

To me its a no-brainer, and a huge missed opportunity for LJ. A victory of bean counters over common sense ..... but you can cut costs as much as you want, you still need people to come to the site to generate revenue.

 

[unclearthur]

The main project page is a catastrophe, with tiny, grainy and distorted pictures which make every project look bad. Totally unappealling to browse through, so people don't. Hence your low comment count.

The shortcoming to that page, and the implications for a project orientated community site, were pointed out a long time ago, but nothing has changed. People who like looking at other people's projects have gone elsewhere.

 

[unclearthur]

I would say the site is going to stay as it is. I've come to the realization that asking/recommending change is falling on deaf ears.

Agreed. Improving the project part would be easy, but the corporate guys probably forbid any customization as it would increase maintenance costs for the website. Basically has to work within the same paramaters as all the other forums.

It is really the typical sequence:

• something gets popular because its unique
• it gets bought by BigCompany because it popular
• BigCompany makes it generic to save costs
• it dies