Keenspot's new look!

[Tanukitsune]

WOAH! Check out the new look! Everything is different....
So green... I don't know if I will get used to it...
There is even a new logo!?!
I don't know what is more surprising...
The new look or the fact that I'm the first to post this?
I guess you could say Keenspot became keener!
Keener than Commander Keen!

[gwalla]

I like it! It's a lot better organized than the old pog form, and the mouseover descriptions are very cool.

[Marcos]

At least on my browser (Opera 6 for Linux), the comic titles are just barely large enough to be legible.

[JunkyardDawg]

The 'sorted by category' thing is an excellent idea, but I'm a little werirded out by the fact that CRFH is apparently now a Science Fiction story.

Also, every time I see the new logo out of the corner of my eye I think "looks like a new brand of detergent". Perhaps it'll grow on me.

[Tanukitsune]

It IS more confusing... for now...
I just noticed Queen Of Wands is now a Keenspot comic...
Its also hard to find each comic since I never bothered to think what genre it belonged to....
Should ALIEN Dice be in Sci-fi and not fantasy?
Oh well, I supposed we will get used to it...
But it DOES look cooler....
Even Keenswag and Quickkeen are green now!

[Freak]

Friendly Hostile was also spotted. And I noticed CRFH is under two categories.

[MarkGhostz]

Great new design, looks a LOT more professional than the old one.

The categorized list might be a bit confusing with some comics that stradle the lines but it's just more user friendly than a huge alphabetical list, especially for people new to the keenspot comics.

By the way, while the comics have the new topbar, the homepage still shows the old topbar with the old logo for me. I don't really see why that page needs that bar to begin with though.

[Sebastian]

pro: is cleaner and neater of the old one. It is better organized and there is a lot of space for the next new comics

con. is a little too... "serious". It doesn't look like a comic site at a first look, but I suppose I could get used to it could

And some comics are not in the correct categories.

Alien Dice and Goonish Shive should be under sci-fi

Gene Catlow should be under Fantasy

College Rommies From Hell... now, this is tricky. Could be Fantasy or Life or even Adventure but I don't think it fit under Sci-fi

And Silly Cone V should be under gaming/technology, of GPF under sci-fi, but they should be both under the same category.

[Mattgasser718]

Really nice job with the updates to the site. It looks professional and cool. All it needs to make it complete would be me:) hahaha

Nice work spotters

[McBean]

I like it. It's got style! It just screams out "So long 1997ish webdesign, hello the future!"

[Radijs]

My feelings are a bit mixed. I like the new logo but I feel that the rest of the site looks a bit "just like every other corporate site". The design doesn't strike me as original.

[wrightc]

Well, not everyone will be pleased. But I have to say I'm thrilled. The Keenspot home page actually makes some kind of sense when you look at it.

[Tim Tylor]

I like it overall. The roll-over "spotlight" on the strips is a great idea. "Archives" looks a good deal better than "Discontinued or Hiatus". I'm not sure about the dullish green colour-scheme.

I'm glad that the Premium-content comics are being listed among the others and marked with asterisks, though I think it should say somewhere on the front page what the asterisks mean. There are also other bits of Premium content with some of the regular strips; the Keen Cribs at "Greystone Inn" and the high-resolution archives and behind-the-scenes stuff at "General Protection Fault". It would be good to have that stuff listed somewhere, especially since it's one of the selling points for Premium.

(Apols for silly banner comment here - TT)

[Crystalis]

I wasn't sure I liked it at first, but I have to say it is an efficient design, with the nice roll-over feature. As for the changes coming to the forums, are they gonna fix the lag that sometimes plagues this place?

[Brad J. Guigar]

I like it overall. The roll-over "spotlight" on the strips is a great idea. "Archives" looks a good deal better than "Discontinued or Hiatus". I'm not sure about the dullish green colour-scheme. ...

The new green tone was a necessary change. The old green was an RGB green that was not possible to duplicate in print. The new green will look the same in print and on your screen.

[Melonpool]

And I think that the categories were selected by the artists.

[Harry the Furry Squid]

I've got mixed feelings.

OK, first the criticisms:

1) It's slow. Very slow. I'm on dialup, so each mouse-over description pulled incurs a delay of 3 to 4 seconds. I would have embedded the necessary mouseover data in the initial page (excluding the image), and perhaps served the page with GZIP compression to compensate. But maybe that's my fault for having dialup.

2) It's heavily table based - my DOM Inspector is showing 3 or 4 levels of table nesting. I can understand why a table is both necessary and appropriate for the actual comic listings, but the remainder of the page is essentially a linear layout, and should be marked up as such. There are also a large number of IFRAMEs, which are less than efficient on many popular browsers.

3) Everything is too damn small, and it's a fixed width design. Is there any particular reason why. Those two points are related. It might look fine on an 800x600 monitor, but pretty much anyone who's brought a computer in a last 5 years or so has a screen with a far higher resolution, and a good proportion will be using it. Even on 1152 (my resolution), it's starting to look silly. The text inviting comments, is just 10px high (~2mm), which is too small for comfort without manual enlargement.

4) It isn't valid HTML. Ignoring the lack of a doctype (which is mandatory -- I suggest using 4.01 transitional), there are 307 mistakes on the front page (according to the W3C validator). It's much easier to make pages behave reliably in any browser when the markup is correct, so in the long term writing valid markup will save time.

5) The images are unnecessarily large. With the help of optimised PNG images, your images could be much smaller, saving Keenspot bandwidth. For example, http://www.keenspot.com/characters/newshounds.gif is 18634 bytes as a GIF. As an optimised PNG, and without changing any characteristics, it is reduced to 16199 bytes (13% reduction). Personally, I'd reduce the palette to 32 colours and dither, bringing the PNG to 13363 bytes (28% reduction), or even apply the same optimisation to GIF, giving 14602 bytes (21% reduction).

6) The list of comics doesn't really stand out, and the categorisation is confusing at times. Personally, I'd be looking for CRFH under "Surreal", but it fits in all kinds of categories, as some others said.

7) Premium content. All that makes Melpomene a premium comic is this little green star. Surely the benefits of premium should be more obvious than that.

No indication of comic popularity. I'm not saying this should be on the main page, but I like to know how popular comics are relative to each other. Let's have that information somewhere.

Now the praise:

1) It looks more professional than before -- that's partly a function of the change in colour scheme, and partly the adoption of more modern design practices.

2) It doesn't load a huge number of images. Although offset rather by runtime slowness, it was difficult to find any particular comic on the old site without waiting for the thumbnails to load.

3) New Keenspot comics. Maybe these were on the old site too, but I seem to see some new faces here. That's good

4) Change for the sake of it -- is often good. In this case, it should wake people up to reading other comics on the list.

--

Overall, I think it's an improvement, but there are a number of technical and usability issues outstanding that could really do with addressing.

[josh l.]

The 'sorted by category' thing is an excellent idea, but I'm a little werirded out by the fact that CRFH is apparently now a Science Fiction story. :-?

I think Martiza requested to be put there. I think. I'm pretty sure, anyway. Did she? I'm PRETTY sure she did. ^^;
Well, in any case, MOST of the comics are in the category because the creator wanted it there. Either that, or Chris and/or I put the comic in the category, showed the author, and they didn't have any complaints.

Making categories is a tough we may revise later. For now, I wanted to keep it relatively simple. As some of y'all noted, some comics fit in many categories, so for each we just went for the ones they predominantly fit in.

Even Keenswag and Quickkeen are green now!

Warpkeen will be green too, eventually. Anyone here use Warpkeen? ^^;

And I noticed CRFH is under two categories.

I'm only seeing it under sci-fi. Maybe it was fixed since you posted this.

I'm glad that the Premium-content comics are being listed among the others and marked with asterisks, though I think it should say somewhere on the front page what the asterisks mean. There are also other bits of Premium content with some of the regular strips; the Keen Cribs at "Greystone Inn" and the high-resolution archives and behind-the-scenes stuff at "General Protection Fault". It would be good to have that stuff listed somewhere, especially since it's one of the selling points for Premium.

I'm afraid I wans't very knowledgable on exactly what Premium content we had when I edited the Premium info pages. ^^; I only wrote "Look around! You may be surprised!" (derher!) for now, but we do need to add a specific list of benefits sometime in the future.

As for the changes coming to the forums, are they gonna fix the lag that sometimes plagues this place?

It's just aesthetic changes; the forums will still be on the same server. Not to say they're not planning to work on the speed of the forums too, but that's not in my area. =3

The new green tone was a necessary change. The old green was an RGB green that was not possible to duplicate in print. The new green will look the same in print and on your screen.

Also, the new green won't make blood shoot out your eyes like the old green did! :)

1) It's slow. Very slow. I'm on dialup, so each mouse-over description pulled incurs a delay of 3 to 4 seconds. I would have embedded the necessary mouseover data in the initial page (excluding the image), and perhaps served the page with GZIP compression to compensate. But maybe that's my fault for having dialup.

I tried to find a million ways to do the mouseover descriptions, and the IFRAME turned out to be the only dependable way to do it across multiple browsers. ^^; I was a little worried about the load times it would cause, but this really was the best way to go, especially when it comes to making it less of a strain to add more comics to this list later down the road. I apologize to all the dial-up users who are suffering from this.

2) It's heavily table based - my DOM Inspector is showing 3 or 4 levels of table nesting. I can understand why a table is both necessary and appropriate for the actual comic listings, but the remainder of the page is essentially a linear layout, and should be marked up as such. There are also a large number of IFRAMEs, which are less than efficient on many popular browsers.

There are only two. Which I guess IS a lot for one page, but oh well. I tried to find other ways besides IFRAME to feature Keenspot's news column too, but eventually had to settle on that.
Sorry, but I don't condsider a site being "heavily table-based" to be an actual problem.

Everything is too damn small, and it's a fixed width design. Is there any particular reason why. Those two points are related. It might look fine on an 800x600 monitor, but pretty much anyone who's brought a computer in a last 5 years or so has a screen with a far higher resolution, and a good proportion will be using it. Even on 1152 (my resolution), it's starting to look silly. The text inviting comments, is just 10px high (~2mm), which is too small for comfort without manual enlargement.

If you fix the width of the site, it looks silly on large resolutions, but if you DO fix the width of the site, it ensures all the text and images are laid out the way you intended them to, on most systems. It's a trade-off. I've designed websites of both types before. In this case, making the width fixed cuts down on a whole lot of ugly empty space that would be created if someone decided to expand their browser all the way on their wide monitor. I think it's worth having it look silly to the 100 people who have 2000-pixel wide monitors.

It isn't valid HTML. Ignoring the lack of a doctype (which is mandatory -- I suggest using 4.01 transitional), there are 307 mistakes on the front page (according to the W3C validator). It's much easier to make pages behave reliably in any browser when the markup is correct, so in the long term writing valid markup will save time.

The way I check and see if a page is "valid" is by looking at it in a web browser. If there's a part that doesn't look the way I intended it to, then it's "invalid."
Seriously, dude. I consider myself to be a pretty anal web designer, but I'm not THAT anal. Online "validators" consider it a mistake if you don't put quotes around the values of every single element in the tags.

5) The images are unnecessarily large. With the help of optimised PNG images, your images could be much smaller, saving Keenspot bandwidth. For example,

PNG is not more optimized than GIF PNG is not more optimized than GIF PNG is not more optimized than GIF PNG is not more optimized than GIF PNG is not more optimized than GIF PNG is not more optimized than GIF PNG is not more optimized than GIF PNG is not more optimized than GIF PNG is not more optimized than GIF PNG is not more optimized than GIF PNG is not more optimized than GIF PNG is not more optimized than GIF PNG is not more optimized than GIF PNG is not more optimized than GIF (etc)
The next person who tells me PNG is revolutionizing the world and I should replace all my GIFs with it is getting kicked in the nuts!

No indication of comic popularity. I'm not saying this should be on the main page, but I like to know how popular comics are relative to each other. Let's have that information somewhere.

This is true. It is one of those necessary evils, I guess. I think the Media Kit would be a good place to put this, and I'm sure Chris will update that section eventually... hahaha

1) It looks more professional than before -- that's partly a function of the change in colour scheme, and partly the adoption of more modern design practices.

2) It doesn't load a huge number of images. Although offset rather by runtime slowness, it was difficult to find any particular comic on the old site without waiting for the thumbnails to load.

3) New Keenspot comics. Maybe these were on the old site too, but I seem to see some new faces here. That's good

4) Change for the sake of it -- is often good. In this case, it should wake people up to reading other comics on the list.

We sure hope so! And thanks for the comments, y'all. Sorry if some of my responses didn't sound very professional. The reason for that is because I'm not very professional.

[Syke]

Well... while Alien Dice is somewhat sci-fi, it's not futuristic. *I don't remember what I said or if I said put it in fantasy or not, there's a good hundred or so posts I'd have to wade through to see what I said,... but I liked it better under Adventure *sniff* when it was under adventure. Sci-fi would probably be more appropriate just because it involves Aliens. I always consider sci-fi like Star Wars, Babylon 5, Firefly... in the future.

It's one of the ones that straddles lines. Honestly.. as much as I was opposed to the term webmanga as a category,... it's the only thing it really fits into since that's the writing style.

I LOVE the green.. it's so kind on the eyes. The entire thing is easier for me to navigate since the spots were just... spots. The star is to designate a Premium strip that way when someone clicks on it, they'll know it's only Premium accessible. *Got to work on my Premium project soon.*

But.. popularity doesn't tell you much. Isn't it good enough that they're on Keenspot? Newer comics may not be very popular to begin with because they're... new. I like looking at my pageviews and unique visits as much as everyone else, but I feel weird about popularity ranking. It makes people feel bad if they're not getting as many hits as others and like they're not good enough to be here,... or inflates egos, which isn't good either. Not that most of the Keenspotters seem to care about hit count, that's just dictates pay, not actual readership.

(Although it is kinda fun to watch the comics that are slightly above mine in the list and see where my site ranks month to month, muwahahahaha.)

[chubbyandnot]

I can't seem to find Ashfield Online on the new format. I'd expect it to be in the surreal section. Granted it hasn't been active in a while, so then it could be under hiatus/sporadic. but no. I see it nowheres.

[Maritza Campos]

I didn't ask it to be there, but it fits, I think. CRFH is one of those comics that are all over the place. It's a school-based sitcom, and it has fantasy elements, and it also has scifi elements, it has adventure, it has weirdness, it has romance etc etc etc. It probably would fit better under "serials" if there was such a category.

Maritza
CRFH.net

[josh l.]

I can't seem to find Ashfield Online on the new format. I'd expect it to be in the surreal section. Granted it hasn't been active in a while, so then it could be under hiatus/sporadic. but no. I see it nowheres.

We decided to leave Ashfield out because we hate Aric, and we want to destroy all evidence that he ever existed.
....Either that, or it was just an oversight on my part. I'll be sure to let Chris and.or Darren know "?" needs to be added to the Archives page. ^^;
Incidentally, "?" is pretty much over, but I heard from a giant kitten that Aric will start a new comic on Keenspot soon.

[Kat]

This design is an incredible improvement.
Kudos!

[BoxJam]

No indication of comic popularity. I'm not saying this should be on the main page, but I like to know how popular comics are relative to each other. Let's have that information somewhere.

I don't understand why. I don't think most companies would put relative popularities of various products out, except to imply they're all popular.

Anyway, if you're going to like the ones that are more popular, you'll like Sinfest, RPG World, GPF and Schlock Mercenary. You won't like me, Silly Cone V, Soap on a Rope or Look What I Brought Home. You'll be very confused about Chopping Block, Superosity and Men in Hats.

[John T]

I should note that I'm on a 56k connection, and the site loads pretty quick for me. If you grow impatient just waiting the four seconds for a comic's description to load, I think you should seek medication.