Front page - space under header

Edited by Marty McFly - October 14 2010 at 08:06

Bad idea.

Remember, this is a website for human beings. By default, human beings does not understand that this website also features other music genres than Canterbury, although a percentage of the human population will use the pop up menu you have attached. Hence, this is not a good idea.

Keep it simple (= keep it as it is) so even sleep walking village idiots like myself also can use this website at 0500 in the morning on our way to work. 

^ OK, it's actually feature that I use the most. I wanted to reduce everything, but genres may remain. Top artists would be nice in the way I proposed I think, it's not that important feature (biggies takes the place and it's not easy to see new artists in this top50).

With genres presented (they're good, because they remain on the same name, don't switch it like Top artists does), we would get 6 lines.

Putting everything in a drop box is not simple. It may look like it is from a software or web developers perspective, but it's hell from a usability perspective. I reckon M@X and Graphix have thought about this when they came up with the current design. 

I did not find the space under the PA header confusing, quite the contrary! It immediately caught my interest, when I first saw it: 
- The list of various sub genres showed me the diversity of the genre.
- With the list of alphabetical letters I can immediately jump with one click to an artist I want to look up.
- The list of popular artists showed me examples of bands that PA members like. (This was the reason I joined eventually. I saw at first sight that the people are interested in the same bands as I am.)
- Misc showed me more features of the site.
I would put none of them in drop down boxes, which eventually hide the selectable elements.
(Only in Prog Shopping I never was interested in. )

Marty McFly wrote: ^ Well, I was confused at first and it took me some time to get accustomed to it.  Top artists are good for impression, but when you want to find something, you cannot, because positions are constantly changing. I wanted to use it as quick link to for example Camel artist page, but I have to find it first. And big names are there most of the times (66%) while the rest are new bands currently popular.

First rule of usability: every item in a product interface has a single purpose. Don't give in to adding additional purposes who want to use it for different purposes - a change for one confuses a million others. If you want a quick link to Camel - use the bookmarks in your browser.

Marty McFly wrote: Alphabetic letters are very useful, true. Subgenres are useful as well, even there could be name-shorting (such as Symphonic Prog to Symphonic, or Crossover Prog to Crossover, because we know we're talking about Prog)

If there's enough space, there's no need for change. And if the subgenre has prog in it's name leave it there. Some of them don't have it, leaving it out for the ones that do leads to a different kind of confusion (and annoyance). Just imagine someone who is assuming 'prog' is omitted on purpose from the main page, and then starts asking about 'who can give me some hints to get into Jazz Rock Prog'?

Marty McFly wrote: The point is how many people actually use Misc.

Run a poll on it. You may be surprised to see how many people use it to find out for example if they missed a new hot album in 2010. Not every prog fan is using the forum discussions to keep track of this you know - there are different frames of reference than just the PA forums when it comes to prog. I know, I've been away from here for 18 months.

Edited by Angelo - October 24 2010 at 18:18