GoldenKlondike's page

That´s a surprise to me. The webstore is super easy to navigate.

There´s also this nice navigation bar on the left side, where you can find everything easily.
Given, the site doesn´t work as well for mobile phones or tablets probably, but that´s not the pinnacle of the world.

~50% of all web traffic is now mobile, so that's not an insignificant chunk of visitors, but the issues are the same on a tablet as on a computer.

The left navigation is an example exactly what I'm suggesting needs to change. I have to check in multiple sections to see if there's any new content. And because it's a mix of content and products in a non-hierarchical structure, I end up missing new products because I forgot to click somewhere, and/or wasting time going to places that don't have any products at all.

Here's another example: http://paizo.com/store/sale/gMsDay2016Sale

That's the products on sale. But then when you scroll down, past the sale icons, it shows the inner sea guide. Why?

There's clearly two classes of users: Ones who just want to buy products, and ones that want all the different kinds of content mixed together. I'm in the former, and the site's built for the latter. I'd argue that most new players are in the former. The site just isn't intuitive.

Look at DriveThruRPG for an example what I'm suggesting. It's clean, fast, and easy to navigate. When I click on a system, I see all the products, and only the products for that section. Hey - maybe that's the simple answer? Sell the PDF's via DriveThruStuff?

If the store is just a store, the blog a blog, the forums a forum, and the reference a reference, it's cleaner and impacts to one won't take down the others. For folks who want to see mixed content, it's possible allow users to add widgets to a personalized home page/dashboard/portal. That'd meet both use cases with a single architecture.

But that's probably out of the realm of the budget :-(.

And then, even worse after having a user-unfriendly initial introduction to the site, the new customer is met with ridicule and hostility from the board veterans.

Bingo. I've built ecommerce and other sites for large and small businesses. one of the basic tenets in a successful site is don't mix functions or overload on density. That impacts both performance and usability. You can absolutely go too far the other direction and waste space, but paizo.com is hardly in danger of that at the moment :-).

I didn't understand the business model, so fine, don't skip a book. I stand by my point that if customers could actually find content, they'd buy more of it.

Skeld wrote:

GoldenKlondike might be assuming that the people who write/produce the PF books are the same people responsible for the website.

This was how I interpreted it, too. I almost lost a mouthful of coffee on it, considering if a book from my line were cut it'd just mean I had nothing to do for a month (putting my job security in jeopardy). It would not mean I could suddenly learn to design websites and go assist the web team in tackling their ever increasing todo list.

Sorry, not at all. Just that any company has a limited budget, so it's a financial trade off. Take the hard cost budget for one book, and use it to fund a website overhaul. There are production costs associated with content beyond staff costs, right? Slow down the production queue to free cash.

And yes, I suspect that if it were easier to find new products, you'd sell more. I regularly find that you released something months ago that I missed because I didn't click on each separate category to see if there was anything new. In a number of cases, it's easier for me to find new content via hero lab package listings than it is on paizo.com!

Let me give more examples.

The home page is a hodgepodge of blog, forum, announcements, store, and ads. The category icons as you scroll down don't match the ones in the menu to the left.

On the left, touch pathfinder, and you see some, but not all products. Campaign setting and player companion on the left look like entirely different products, not categories under pathfinder. Touch campaign setting there, and you're taken to thee apparent choices, 3.5, pathfinder (which leads to a completely different set of products from clicking pathfinder on the left side of the menu), and map folios.

Pathfinder society is also a separate peer category to pathfinder, and is below the fiction, not up with the game.

There's yet another completely independent navigation list of links (it's not a menu) at the top of the screen, and nearly illegible icons at the top left that are yet more redundant navigation to the top and lower left menu.

Specific suggestions:

1) have a clean home page, just a landing pad with navigation to main categories. Don't try to stuff everything in one place. It's a commercial site, not an intranet portal.
2) separate the store, blog and forum and pathfinder static content to four different secondary pages. Don't mix products and content.
3) in the store, have one master pathfinder category, with subcategories for each section: core rule books, adventure path, and campaign setting, but with a true hierarchy you'll have a way to see all the products together. Example: if I click on shirts, I see all shirts, or if I click on a subcategory of men's shirts, I just see those. Basic ecommerce 101. Note: don't mix other properties like card game with the rpg.
4) get rid of the internal ads and banners intertwined with product listings.
5) eliminate redundant navigation methods, including ones that should go to the same products based on name, but don't.
6) make subscription a subcategory. No need to plug it on multiple intermediate pages.

In other words, let the store be just a store.

Bluntly, it's one of the worst ecommerce layouts I've seen since the days of geocities.

A redesign would be great, but I'd settle for a single place to see all non-adventure path pathfinder content. Right now it's a hodgepodge of sections, some of which have content and some that don't. The default sort is oldest first, rather than newest, and so on.

It makes absolutely no logical sense, and more importantly, costs paizo money because it's so hard to find what's new.

To the op though, most watermarked content systems have a two stage download. I don't begrudge Paizo that. I do wish there was an easy way to filter the downloads section to show things ive downloaded that have updates, and an option to hide things I'll never use (like the one file per chapter files).

Spending a few bucks on a real site designer, even if it means skipping one book this year would be a good idea. You'd probably make more net money with an easy to navigate site.

One other thought. Like others, avoid a moden, low density, high white space site. Google nerfed their tablet layout to the point of being unusable (reload/request desktop site is your friend). Don't go that route...there's a sweet spot in the middle between form and function.