Forum structure

[Anonymous]

One thing that seems to be happening is that all the posts are congregating in the general discussion forum, quite often because the actual post is cross platform (eg no point in asking a modelling question in the PC forum, because it applies equally to all media).

One thought would be to reorganise the boards into a slightly smaller number of more directed forums, such as:

Programming and Scripting
Art, Modelling and Music
Business and Finance
Education, Training and Jobs

News, Events and Media Coverage
IGDA Ireland

General Discussion

Dave
(who very much wants his own special forum for folk-metal lovers, upper class Armenian society and all the latest dance moves)

[Anonymous]

Sounds good! PC, Console, Mobile and Online gaming does not seem like the most intuitive way to structure Games Development Topics. This does work well however in the industry Topics section.

Games Development Topics are usually organised in the same way http://www.datascope.co.uk categorises job postings.

“folk-metal lovers, upper class Armenian society and all the latest dance moves” I’m all for that!

Don’t forget design?

Cheers,
Ian

[Anonymous]

I think that it’s a very good idea but as Ian said we should include design. The IGDA has a ‘game design and writing’ forum, how about something similar?

So I’m all for it. Should help the forum continue to prosper alongside the Irish game industry. :)

[Anonymous]

I dont know that there is a need for a splitting of the forums. There aren’t that huge amount of posts to necessitate it at the moment.

How about a Tag in the headline of posts instead:
[Prog] – programming
[GDes] – Game Design
[3d] – 3d Modelling
etc….
What we call the complete forum or which one we put it in is another question – Game Development forum?

[Anonymous]

I kind of lean more towards Dave’s idea – but I think more could be done to make the site more accessible and user-friendly than simply re-naming or re-grouping the forums.

Let me take the main navigation bar as an example:
because we naturally read right to left, more attention is given to the things our eyes meet first. For greater usability, I would re-order these options as “Community | Resources | News | Features”

‘Home’ I would remove as it contains little of interest not found elsewhere in the site and the logo is a generally accepted convention for navigating back tot he home page, but a link to it could also be placed on a page footer

‘About’ & ‘Contact’ I would also relegate to the footer as they are of significanlt less import than the other options

This frees up space in the main navigation bar to pull out some of the more useful options ‘Forums’ & ‘Jobs’ for example and making them that bit easier to find

Just a few suggestions. There’s a lot more that could be done with the information architecture of the site to improve usability and drive traffic, e.g. pull the resources links out of the forums and post them on a page fo their own to make them easy to find and use – but as the main focus of the site is on the forums it makes sense to focus on them first

[Anonymous]

I was also thinking that a separate area within ‘resources’ could be used for listing useful books, sites, etc. These have been mentioned before in the forum discussions themselves, but extracting them for ease of access might be a good idea

[Author]

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