New Look Online for WoW Website
by Mike D'Anna 
Jul 6th 2006 at 11:00AM
The official Blizzard World of Warcraft site has a new look today, as they have finally switched over to their new template, as they announced earlier. The new design looks to be a huge improvement over the old one, but that's less a testimony to the designer's skills than to the fact that their previous website was simply one of the worst professional video game websites I've ever seen...I guess it wasn't the design of it really, as much as the fact that the darn thing just never seemed to work. It seems (on my end, anyway) like every time the game servers have any trouble, the website goes down as well...which is the first place most people are going to go if the game servers are down. Oh well, let's hope the new website is more reliable.
What do you guys prefer? New or old?
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, Blizzard, News items
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
josh Jul 6th 2006 11:34AM
Well... it's got more bells and whistles than a 4th of July parade. And on my 3mbps DSL it takes almost a whole 10 seconds to load.
I'm it'll hold up well when the game servers come down and everyone hits it at once *cough*.
It's a whole lotta eye candy for a jump page that takes more time to load than anybody will ever spend looking at it.
Lets face it, homepages are there to get you where you are going. They aren't a destination. When I go to wow's site i spend about 1 second on the fully loaded page to click the link for where I want to go.
A good page is a fast page. And you can make fast loading aesthetically pleasing pages. I'd say this new one goes just a tad overboard.
joseph Jul 6th 2006 11:38AM
But still no RSS feed :(
PsyClerk Jul 6th 2006 11:39AM
Would love to look at it but I've not been able to access it all morning. I can hit the forums with direct links, but the front page simply times out.
You'd think they would spend the smallest fraction of all that money they make on a decent web server that can handle six million users. But you'd be wrong.
Brad Jul 6th 2006 11:46AM
I'm confused by your statement "their previous website was simply one of the worst professional video game websites I've ever seen." Did you mean that it was poorly designed, or that it was bad because it kept going down?
The former point I would agree with more readily. Near the end they tried to patch it up to make it feel more coherent, so a complete revamp was a good idea. However there are two glaring problems with the new site:
1) The site definitely has more content. More content = longer loading times. It's one of the first things I noticed with the beta and now the home page. The Flash doesn't help load times, which leads me to my second point -
2) Flash has been a bane on web development for years. Thankfully we only get a window of it at the top of the page, but for a lot of people: watch your cpu cycles.
Blizzard fixed the navigation, but they went overboard trying to make the site easier to get around by adding nav menus all around the front page; on the left, on the right, on top, on the bottom. If they wanted to make things easier, less is more.
Before I look like I'm just poo-pooing Blizzard, there are also two compliments:
1) They use XML to deliver their pages now. Kudos to Blizzard for bringing the site closer to web standards and modern practices. I would like to see them actually validate the XML at some point in the future though.
2) Site content has structure, and logical naviagation now, and doesn't look stitched together.
Blizzard wins in the end, I would have traded anything for a site that was easier to navigate and find the information I was looking for.
Duwanis Jul 6th 2006 11:48AM
The first time you load any page of that size it will load slow. Caching is a wonderful thing, though, and you should notice that all subsequent loads will be faster.
The navigation is the same on this page as it was on the other page, so clicks-to-destination should be the same. I like it because it's more compact - especially since news stories are collapsed - but it does seem a bit more visually busy. But then I'm not a graphic designer, so I can't really critique that :)
mike Jul 6th 2006 12:42PM
The new site makes firefox hang on my mac (MacBook Pro).
mike
kG Jul 6th 2006 1:33PM
No problems here in OS X 10.4.7 with Firefox 1.5.0.4 or Safari, though this is a PPC based Mac. I'm running the latest QuickTime and Flash Player 8 (not the new version 9). The site loads quickly, and only shows a very slight hesitation when scrolling all that newfangled stuff.
Brad- How do you know it's being delivered using XML? I saw the earlier beta version, but never any notes or details about it.
Tim Chetelat Jul 6th 2006 3:07PM
20" Intel iMac, 10.4.7, running Camino instead of Firefox (same rendering engine as Firefox, but supports things in OS-X like better keyboard nav/entry in web forms, etc etc etc). The WoW site loads correctly, if a little slowly.
obo Jul 6th 2006 7:42PM
Funny, the forums look the same. What got redesigned?
Oh, worldofwarcraft.com? They still run that?
Who knew.
Effereal Jul 6th 2006 8:08PM
Main warcraft site is down, as we speak. Looks like their web dev team is taking its cues from the game server team.....
paco Jul 7th 2006 3:23PM
Of course the site is going to be down when the servers are down.
Either they are having network problems and everything associated with them is down, or everybody is hitting the site trying to check their server status and causing a DDOS.
Its simple internet dynamics, kinda like the pipes get clogged...
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/07/06/the_internet_a_serie.html