So things are moving along quite nicely now. Traffic to the site is practically on par with the traffic numbers from TESSource which is always good news and the feedback has been excellent.

Many people like the new design of the site and quite a few don't but that is to be expected. All of us inherently resent change so when something you've been using for several years has a make over you're going to feel a little lost and aggrivated. Probably the biggest niggle has been the blog-esque all-right navigation on the site (this site design is actually a rework of a blogging template used on many sites). I personally really like it, it takes up the same amount of space as a left + right navigation system (ala TESSource) but everything is centralised into one area; content all on the left and functionality all on the right, which makes sense to me. There's been a few haters who, quote, "just can't stand it", which I really cannot understand. Sometimes I think that people just aren't willing to come to terms with change and just want it "how it was", which just isn't possible.

From 6 years of running all these various Elder Scrolls related sites I've learnt a great lesson; you most definately cannot please everyone. Some people didn't like the TESSource layout and now really like the Nexus layout. Some people really liked the TESSource layout but don't like the Nexus layout. Some people like them both. So how do I cater to all these needs without making my job hell and limiting functionality and efficiency? That's what I'm trying to find out.

Obviously one of the best ways to do this would be to let the user decide how they want the site to look. Do you want the navigation all on the right or on the left and right? Unfortunately that brings in some problems of its own. Will I have to edit several different stylesheets to accommodate everyone when I make a change to the site? That obviously isn't desireable to me. It's something I am looking into.

One option would be to have an option for the left control column to use small icons. This would significantly reduce the width, which, if memory serves, was one of the bigger complaints about having both columns on one side of the page.

Trying to please everyone would be a big hassel ... I don't really care about how the site looks as long as it all works ... Note : When I put my little cursor in the 'search' text field the font is white on a very pale yellow background so I can't see what I'm typing ... you should make the text in the searchbox a dark color ... but other than that, I'd leave it alone ... people will get used to it.

A browser plugin on your end is causing this. Take a look at your settings to fix it.

I personally love the new site. I didn't like how when I searched for mods it was in a block style, but then I saw the flat style, changed it, and there was awesomeness. I actually really like all the links on the right. To be honest, them being on the left strained my eyes. This site pwns. And I know what you mean by traffic. I just uploaded my first file yesterday, and already it's been downloaded by somewhere over 70 people. The Phoenix rose, and we saw.

As you can tell from my sig, I miss TESSource. I like TESNexus, but TESSource was like another appendage to me. You cut off my arm and replaced it with someone else's. You're right Dark0ne, the only reason I like TESSource more is because I don't like change. Although this new arm is better than my last one, it's still a foreign arm.

The title of this topic reminds me of how Milla Jovovich's char in The Fifth Element was made Anyway, I always tell myself and others that you can't please everyone - it's impossible, as in it will never be possible. EVER. PERIOD.

Like I said, I like the new site better, and I think it's for the better so you can distance yourself away from the old Gaming Source (or TES Source as it was really the only site with the most activity ). I think what we need now is to have a Quake Wars Nexus, which could also include Quake 4. And maybe in the future when id Software releases Doom 4, there could be a Doom 4 Nexus...

Well, that would just be QuakeNexus and DoomNexus. It's called TESNexus, not TES4Nexus.

I just have to say that I liked TESS and I like TesNexus. I'm just glad things are back up and running. You can't please everyone all the time.

If you feel like it, if YOU want, if you have time later, maybe you can make another style sheet or two. Then you can use those little web utils so the user can change up their look.

@ ninja_lord666: Dat true

@ Gankuku: The only way I know of that you could change the current layout (if you don't like it that much) is with Firefox and the "userstyles" extension. You could (if you know what doing, that is) use a "style" to customize how a website looks WITHOUT actually editing the site itself. It is pretty handy, so I just thought I'd mention it.

Coming from the perspective of another site designer, it needs work, maybe cut some things down, merge blocks on the file download pages, and tweaked for usability. Then it wouldn't get so many complaints.

This http://smuniversity.lolitacomplex.net/screennex.jpg is what I don't like about the change. The messed up parts. I also don't like the nav being on the right side... it seems more natural having it on the left, and to me, the nav bars should not be that intrusive. It doesn't have to be obscure to get to, but less in-your-face would be better.

If this was a blog, it would be different since you'd be dealing with mostly just text, but it's not. You're trying to read a billion blocks that's way too big for the info it contains, while trying to download a file (or figuring out why the pop up came up with raw php code) or figuring out WHICH file to download. On top of that, the blocks for the file info are all spread out, making it worse. I've gotten somewhat used to how it is now, but reading files and comments suck. Just my two cents.

Just a note: I didn't join the site until shortly before Source went down, and then I barely used it at all, so this isn't more a old vs new thing for me. It's an "I can't find all the darned stuff" and "this looks squished and hard to read."

I love the look of TESNexus, and with flat view file browsing is now improved. I like the nav as well, but I do wish some aspects weren't so...broken...
http://img205.imageshack.us/img205/9742/tesnexuspc3.jpg

NoScript browser plugin I presume. I'm obviously not going to make my site compatible with a browser plugin that blocks all ads on sites. Similarly you are running at 1024 width resolution which is going to make things cramped.



That looks crazy!

I'm running IE7 and FireFox and that page loads fine for me. Perhaps it's time to update that software you're using and get rid of the pathetic lack of transparency on PNG images that IE6 has!

Likewise. Feel free to accuse me of being biased, but it's a fact that those screenshots and descriptions are seriously messed up. Site looks perfectly fine to me. I stick to the forums most of the time but I just had to see for myself after reading the last two posts above Robs.

I’m in agreement with Siadhail & Gankaku, if you could add a “View New Post” button to the bottom of the forums page & a quick way to go to the mods (tesnexus.com) that would be even better.
Thanks DarkOne!

I love TES NEXUS !

http://www.d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y.com/

I am one who likes the site. It is easy on the pc and it dosn't take 10 minutes to load a page. The site is functional in Explorer but not so with firefox this is the only thing I would like to see changed as all sites should be optimized for both anyway. As far as asthetics the only thing that needs a bit of work is the banner image it is fine but something that is a good representation of the amazing graphics or the increadibely talented mods that are on this site a reflection of the community may need some work. If you want you could always make customized stlye sheets available to dontators of the site to make it a worthwhile way to spend your time...Just an idea.
Tessa.

To be honest I find myself going to PES more for one nagging reason; "Latest Files" no longer displays both new and updated files, just new files. I'd rather avoid PES, however, fileplanet has annoyed me for years.

At the beginning I was a little confused by the new look. Now I had tried the new functions, and I consider Tesnexus superior, also not considering that it is still a work-in-progeress site. Great work DarkOe!! Let you continue on your own way!!

“Similarly you are running at 1024 width resolution which is going to make things cramped.”



Please try to remember that not everyone out there is running on flat screens and that for a lot of folks 1024x768 is a pretty common resolution. My rig doesn’t run Oblivion any higher without major problems. Are you asking me to reset my settings every time I visit your site?

I personally prefer menus on the left (ala Planet Elder Scrolls, however that has it on both sides). But the thing i find really annoying about nexus is the bloody ads in the middle of the description of mods and comments! It really takes away from the site. Once again, a reference to PES, it has ads only on the top and a little bit of the right side! So, obviously my first choice is PES, not only because of these reasons but because new mods are displayed on the right side. Nexus doesn't have anyway to find new mods apart from a manual search. Man, I think you really stuffed up this site.

--------------------
Papa Smurf was here.

The "Standard" for websites is still 800x600, which is ridiculous, considering there are monitors which support 3x that resolution.
People with low res monitors just need to catch up with technology. 19" LCD High res, wide screen monitors are as low as $150 US these days.
There is no reason for anyone to be running an ancient 16-19" low res CRT monitor.

Personally, I like this site design much more than tessource. I thought TESS was a bit unorganized and slow. This site is neither.
More and more websites are doing the whole "info on the left, nav on the right", since most of the world does in-fact read left to right.

You obviously haven't done much exploring, there are infact 3 different pages, available on every single page in the navigation pane, dedicated to this concept:

Updates today
Updates recently
Latest files

I use FireFox & it works great. Do you want some kind of collage for the banner?
I think this one is good



TES Nexus is a lot better than PES & the reality of it is that the ads pay the bills and DarkOne should put them wherever he thinks they should be period.
There are plenty of ways to find new mods as DarkOne points out (not just Manually searching), this site ROCKS.

Yep: All you should have to do is to remove those squarelines("light shadows") around the aliases ("buttons") ;-)

Can't help it, but smells a bit Star War's like, doesn't it?

This is funny, as i'm right handed, I often think it 'd be a good idea to have the click-lists on the right

I'll admit at first I wasn't too happy about the change but after awhile I've become accustomed to this new website and I think that you did good for everything that happened and what not. I think the layout is fine it just needs some add ons. As to what they may be...I can't really say at this time maybe what could be useful is to allow photos of said mod (like PES, they do have that right?)

Anyways...you can't please everyone. I can definitely say that its good to be able to get these mods unlike PES which has become a file planet fanatic now. Arrgh! You can't download any mod there without being booted to this file planet subscription page. Which is total b.s. because PES is suppose to be free to download those mods.

So over all I do find the right to left a little hard to handle but I see no need to change it. Seems rather easy to find and search through for the most part. Well done.

~LV

Modders can upload photos and did, but when TESSource was shut down, all the photos were deleted.

I like the new site. The plain grey background is a little dull, but I don't come here for the website aesthetics. The squished-up comments and descriptions could use some tweaking, but as long as I can read them, I'm happy. I really like having the content on the left and the funtionality on the right; this site's actually easier for me to navigate than TESSource. In fact, the only thing that really bugs me about this new site is so minor, I am probably the only one who cares about it. It's the typo in the downloads window pop-up, the one that says:

If you do not receive an error, and the page continues to load, please be patience.

It wouldn't bother me so much, except that I have to see it over and over again. Maybe someday, if you ever get a spare moment, you could fix it?

Yes, of course. Personally, I didn't like the site when I first saw it. I was extremely confused. However, it is really the same layout. It's no big change; it's just mirrored.

I really do like the new site for the most part. It just seems like there aren't as many, like, imagez? Is that like a designer error or did they get deleted? Meh, just kind of a bummer.

Would it be possible to devide the "Updates Toaday" and recently section into seperate Oblivion and Morrowind lists?
It would make browsing for new/interesting stuff less irritating....I've often thought "Hey that sounds good" and then followed the link to find its for the other game. ["Other" varies depending upon ones main interest of course....]

Thanks for putting the time and energy and probably also money into this website. This is the best website for Oblivion mods under 50mb of size. Thanks again

First what I like about TESNexus : speed, navigation easiness, look.

But, as always, there is room for improvement:

- The comments lists are a bit bugged, especially on the top, where they seem to interfere with the menu. I use 1024x768 res.

- When downloading >2Mb, the download window does not always appear, and sometimes the file gets opened in the archive management program. This is no good, because if I close the window, the temporary file will disappear from my HD, and I will have to d/l again ! I am using IE6.

- From Mod Comments page, I cannot find any <Back to Mod> button, I think it would be useful.


I want to remark that I find the site very enjoyable !

don't fret too much about it.

i'm a freelance web designer who has, in the past, been a great proponent of the style choices you have made on texnexus, though i did vote that i don't like the layout of the new site.

coming from the "don't like new layout" camp i'd like to offer you my support in what you are doing and say that while my own personal design philosophies now take me away from such a layout, i think there are far more important things for you to spend your time on.

if you ran another poll where there was an option that said "i'm not overly keen on the new layout but i would rather you spent time on more important things" i'm sure that many from this camp would choose that instead.

if you do want to do something design-wise, i'd look at the layout problems that occur in IE due to advertisment placement (particularly when viewing lists of mods). it works fine on firefox for me, just not on IE.

outside of that, just concentrate on keeping this the best elderscrolls mod database out there.

all in all, a good job. you should be congratulated for the speed at which you made texnexus available once more - outstanding. build on that, don't attempt to cater to everyones ideal design.

like you said, as many people are using tesnexus now as were tessource. that's what matters.

I cant download

i heard something about that you cant mod oblivion on 360 is this true?

very much so.

you can only add the offical mods by Bethesda

The site is good - great even. I think most of us are just glad to see a resource this big available at all. Anyone who "hates" the layout of the site must be living a very luxurious life indeed.

So cheers and well done...

I think it's pretty obvious you can't please everyone with your new design. But I also think this is related to which part of the brain each one use the most (left or right).

First, you must accept the fact we read from left to right.

So, you have the people who use more their left side of the brain, the rationnal half. For them, the actions, what you want to do, all the stuff you need to navigate has to come first. So they will prefer a design where the navigation pane will be at left since it's the first "logic" step. As simple as that. Those people won't really like the current design since the news, the fluffy stuff comes first and it's kind of chaos out there, it's not rationnal, not "logic".

And then, you have the emotional people, those who use more their right side of the brain. They will want to deal with the fun stuff first, the thoughts, the news, the pictures and let the boring "logical" stuff at the end. Those people will like the new design since it reflect their personality, they don't want to be bored with technical stuff, they just want to see the goodies.

In my opinion, I don't dislike the new design, but I would prefer for sure that the navigation pane would be on the left side. It's the "logical" choice, it's more natural since we read following that direction and it's really easier to find what you are looking for.

Let put it this way, "emotional" people will always have a little bit of chaos in the way they manage all their things and they will adapt themselves to everything even if they don't really like the look of it. But those who are more logical won't be able to adapt themselves to the new design since they can't "regress" to chaos, it's just annoying. Each time a "logical" person will look at the site, they will see a flaw in it, chaos, something will be missing for them. That won't be the case for "emotional" people as long as you put some esthetic into the site.

So I guess I would opt for the left navigation pane if I had a choice.

Do what you want with YOUR site, you don't always have that luxury so use it all you can!

Nice work by the way

@TheThirdRace
Your post made me laugh pretty hard.
I have a minor in Psychology.
Developmental, Abnormal and Normal.

How people prefer to interact with this site has nothing to do with logic or emotion.
Me for example. I am quite dead in the emotion department.
By your statement, I should love to see this site with the nav on the left, since I do in fact make all my decisions based on logic and not emotion.
But guess what, I like the nav on the right side. The major factor being that I am right handed, so I like controls(the nav) to also be on the right side. As everyone should know, the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body.
Which again, by your post, I should like the nav on the left side, since by your post, the left side of the brain is the logic portion.

Nah, you can leave the site the way it is; you've put enough hard work into it! bb

I love the new layout. Thanks for all you're doing to keep the site going - most of us would have nowhere to host our mods otherwise.

I like it overall, preferred the Source layout but don't really mind either way. However, logging in on Nexus didn't work, I had to go into these forums specifically in order to login and give a comment. Annoying...

But so long as I can keep my mod uploaded, I'm cool with it.

I think it's all quite alright. Been through quite a few changes during my time here, but I can't say it's too much of a fuss to me. The people are still the same.

There is problem with Texnexus right now, the mods descriptions are not been displayed and the first link does not work and the second does not load...

I find that this is a better site not so much for
the way it is now done but because it is maintained and kept current much better than the old tessource site. I vote to keep it this way and keep up the good work.
The only thing on my wish list is that there could be a way to test the MOD's in the way they interact with the other MOD's. This is not possible as I see it but it is a nice thought.

Madgamer

I'm not sure if you use Firefox (about 40% of web users do), but your css shows up a bit buggy. Mainly, your 'right-side' bar acts a bit like jello, but the 'left-side' is completely liquid. This really makes viewing the pages in a small window (so as to monitor other windows at the same time) essentially impossible, as all the words in the 'content' pane on the left get squished up into fragmented words. Wondering if you could test your pages out in different web browsers to see how they behave before publishing? (Also, just so you know, your main page, texnexus.com, contains 60 errors according to w3 standards, <www.validator.w3.org>, which might have something to do with the buggy dispay problems in firefox)