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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.
I'm not sure how you think the business works, but Paizo makes their money on books. Skipping one leaves them less money, not more.
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What is an example of a modern website, anyway?
Got to go to work, but here's one.
Kickstarter.com
First complaint: where exactly is the search box? Oh. You actually have to click on the words "Search Projects"? There's no sign that there's a text-entry field there. No box around it, nothing. Just... for some reason when you click on that text your can type into it. Yeah, the mouse-cursor changes when you mouseover, but that's pretty darned subtle. Also, even once you click in the box, "Search Projects" remains in the box until you type anything. So... did it work? Am I actually in a box I should fill in, or am I just in the middle of some highlightable text? Why shouldn't this be OBVIOUS?
Second complain: you might not see this unless you're logged in, but a massive part of the site's useful interface is hidden in the ME button in the upper right corner. Why is everything hidden in there? By contrast, at Paizo, most things (such as My Account) are visible and ask for credentials when you try to access them. You can SEE what you want, and are challenged for identity when it's needed.
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You know, "modern design" isn't just an euphemism for "design decisions I don't like." A lot of work has been done on understanding how users interact with a site, how information architecture informs navigation decisions, how search engines can find the most relevant content, how to build more efficient layouts that don't rely on tables, ways to speed up the loading of the site so people get to their pages faster, that sort of thing. None of these, at least when done properly, mean that you'll hate a website using them.
Paizo has been updating aspects of the site piecemeal, and there's nothing wrong with that--incremental design is considered a best practice! A larger update to the design is probably necessary in the long run, but it may not make sense for Paizo right now--it takes time and money that could be spent elsewhere. I don't know their infrastructure, but from what I've heard, I would expect that we won't see a full rework at least until they start migrating away from WebObjects.
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I assume GoldenKlondike means to say that they believe an easy-to-navigate website will lead to more people successfully navigating the website to a product they want to purchase, leading to more sales of existing products through the Paizo.com store. Whether the additional sales gained by having a website that is easier to use is worth the sales lost from skipping one book is not something I can say without having access to data that I don't have.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.I'm not sure how you think the business works, but Paizo makes their money on books. Skipping one leaves them less money, not more.
I got that part. What I don't understand is how skipping a book is supposed to make redesigning the website and implementing those designs any easier.
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GoldenKlondike might be assuming that the people who write/produce the PF books are the same people responsible for the website.
GoldenKlondike's comment about getting a "real developer" implies the people at Paizo currently doing that work aren't competent and/or that isn't their primary responsibility.
At least that's what I took from the comment.
-Skeld
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You know, "modern design" isn't just an euphemism for "design decisions I don't like."
Agreed. But it has recently become an euphemism for "web design by fashionistas". I get it that some of the interface changes are necessary to support modern devices such as touch-interface tablets and phones. I do. But there's NO valid reason to remove visual cues from around a search box. That's just someone who's following the latest style guides out of Paris.
A lot of work has been done on understanding how users interact with a site, how information architecture informs navigation decisions, how search engines can find the most relevant content, how to build more efficient layouts that don't rely on tables, ways to speed up the loading of the site so people get to their pages faster, that sort of thing. None of these, at least when done properly, mean that you'll hate a website using them.
How to speed up a web site: remove the megabyte of javascript from each page.
Paizo has been updating aspects of the site piecemeal, and there's nothing wrong with that--incremental design is considered a best practice! A larger update to the design is probably necessary in the long run, but it may not make sense for Paizo right now--it takes time and money that could be spent elsewhere. I don't know their infrastructure, but from what I've heard, I would expect that we won't see a full rework at least until they start migrating away from
WebObjects.
Slow and steady wins the race.
Developer
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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.
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...
It's organized around the different product lines, each of which is a little different and don't necessarily mix together.
"Role Playing game" is for straight-up rulebooks, intended for players and GMs, that contain minimal setting fluff. They're hardcovers and get ~3 books/year.
"Campaign Setting" is the opposite. They're specific to some facet of the setting, don't contain as much rule information, and are GM-centric. They're 64-page softcovers (usually) and get ~10 books/year.
"Companions" are player-focused, fluffy, 32-page softcovers. They contain a mix of targeted setting background and player options. They get about 1 book/month.
"Modules" are 96-page, self-contained adventures. They're softcovers and get ~4 books/year.
"Adventure paths" are 96-pages, softcover, and released monthly. 6 volumes to an AP; 2 APs/year.
Putting all the non-AP material in a single place would lead to some confusion as to what products are generic-ish...What you have defined here is the difficulty of the problem needing solving, not a reason why these cannot be meaningfully combined. I do like this particular division, but there could be many other choices that work, and certainly some that are better for different things.
Designating something as officially tied to something else is not even tricksome. The trick is doing it efficiently.
Standard flags could make it abundantly clear what fits with what.
I think the main reason those categories are set up the way they are is because Paizo's bread-and-butter is its subscriptions. Letting people know what they get when they sign up for a particular subscription is key.
For instance, if you subscribe to the Pathfinder Companion line, you'll get everything listed under Pathfinder Companion and nothing under Pathfinder Campaign Setting, even though the products are often thematically related. I know there always used to be some confusion about whether the Adventure Path line included the Adventure Path map folios, which are in the Campaign Setting line.
TL;DR: Paizo's web store was really designed to sell subscriptions, not one-off purchases.
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Developer
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For instance, if you subscribe to the Pathfinder Companion line, you'll get everything listed under Pathfinder Companion and nothing under Pathfinder Campaign Setting, even though the products are often thematically related. I know there always used to be some confusion about whether the Adventure Path line included the Adventure Path map folios, which are in the Campaign Setting line.
Furthermore, determining where the limits of "thematically related" are can be extremely subjective. You could make an argument that some books are connected to dozens of others, and at that point it becomes less helpful and more obstructive to have a long list of things that may or may not actually be linked in a way that a particular user finds useful.
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Um. Hey. Does "I still use Office 2003 because I find menus more intuitive than ribbons" count? 'Cuz I totally do.I think the last time Microsoft added a feature to Word that I actually wanted was about 1992.
Are there any plans for Paizo to create their own word processing software?
Editing, layout, art direction and development are all done in-house at Paizo. They are static costs.
Some writing is done in house to, but I think it is fair to say that majority is done by freelancers. However, the cost of writing a book is relatively low, words are cheap. Those words also happen spin out into other sources of income, if they had not written edge of anarchy(I think) there would be no harrow deck, no burnt offerings, no goblin plushies. They can't predict which thing are going to go down well so there is an opportunity cost too
Art is a lot more expensive, but art also finds a lot of secondary uses from marketing to other profits.
So in short, not producing a book will not reduce their cost nearly as much as you seem to think, while it will reduce their income and the way the fans see their output significantly
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I gotta agree with the OP. A lot of the messageboards may as well be a wasteland. It takes a lot of scrolling (to the point it's easy to overlook things) to get to different topic areas. It's especially noticeable as ugly and flawed when you have to trudge through all the old playtest headers.
A good forum would be something like the one at Giant in the Playground where stuff is neatly organized, easy to find, and has sensible subforums.
And for the love, a decent formatting and editing system would be a godsend. :|
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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.
Neverminding that, as Mark points out, if you cut a book, you will have staff with a sudden amount of time on their hands, I still don't see how freeing up the production budget of a book is supposed to help (re-)build the website. You'd also lose the income associated with the book, which is greater than the cost of the book. (If it weren't, Paizo would be losing money on its books and thus go out of business.)
Sure, you might get some money in the short term, but getting money in the short term at the cost of the long term is what bank loans are for - not shortchanging your own business model.
What you're proposing is something like skipping work to change your car's oil. Sure, you saved $20 by not going to a mechanic, but you lost a day's wages.
I also think you're massively underestimating the costs of redesigning and rebuilding the website.
To be clear - there are things I'd like to see cleaned up and modernized, too. But saying "I know everything you need to do - it's easy" implies that the Paizo staff is either incompetent (because they haven't thought of, in years, what you've decided after 5 minutes) or lazy (because they have thought of it and haven't bothered.)
Plus it makes you sound like this.
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I gotta agree with the OP. A lot of the messageboards may as well be a wasteland. It takes a lot of scrolling (to the point it's easy to overlook things) to get to different topic areas. It's especially noticeable as ugly and flawed when you have to trudge through all the old playtest headers.
A good forum would be something like the one at Giant in the Playground where stuff is neatly organized, easy to find, and has sensible subforums.
And for the love, a decent formatting and editing system would be a godsend. :|
Who checks the old playtest forums besides few rabid gamists who cherry pick their Aquaman vs Batman arguments there, anyway? :)
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I gotta agree with the OP. A lot of the messageboards may as well be a wasteland. It takes a lot of scrolling (to the point it's easy to overlook things) to get to different topic areas. It's especially noticeable as ugly and flawed when you have to trudge through all the old playtest headers.
Why don't you just close the playtest forums? All you can see on my forum view is a single line that says Ultimate Intrigue Playtest; the rest of them, wherever they are, aren't even visible.
GitP is the kind of forum I can't stand, where you can't see anything without clicking into each separate forum and back out, over and over again. I like everything being accessible at a glance ... except for the stuff I choose to close.
Look at all the stuff I'm either not interested in or avoiding spoilers for! Really cuts down on the scrolling .... as does Focus view.
You guys can snark all you want, the OP certainly has a valid point - the Paizo website is out-of-date.Good.
I've had enough of "modern" design, thank you very much. While it wouldn't be harmful to support the underline BBCODE, much of modern design seems to be about annoying users, not enabling them.
I don't need menus replaced by clickable lines that throw moving sheets of options. I don't need search boxes and fields that have no border differentiating them from the areas around them. I don't need buttons flattened so they look like part of the background.
User interface should NOT be hidden. Chrome is wrong. Period.
We're living in a world where the arties have taken control over the web and have decreed that a car's steering wheel should be concealed in the trunk, under the spare tire, because "clean!"
It's obnoxious.
So yeah. I won't argue against architectural and infrastructural changes as Paizo sees fit, but as far as appearance is concerned frankly I find this a comforting refuge from the user-hostile environment the web has become in the last three years.
**ADDENDUM**
I'm currently struggling with a philosophical issue. I want to support someone via Patreon. I was two clicks from giving them a significant boost in funding. But various browser plugins proceeded to tell me how intrusive Patreon's site is. They're sharing data with an awful lot of other domains. While I'm used to Google Analytics, there were a half-dozen other nosy demographics networks involved. Sorry, no. Privacy by default. Ask me if you want to share my information. The web has become evil.
I wish I could favorite this more than once.
Customer Service Manager
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Most of us at Paizo (if not everyone) agrees that the website can be improved.
Being on the inside, we have the benefit of seeing the trade off's and pros and cons of certain features or functions in both short and long term. We know that upgrades to one function might mean delayed upgrades to another, and there are occasions that something needs to be fixed now that moves things out that can be fixed "later". For example: new security requirements, or adjustments to checkout, or shipping that has to be fixed now may push off things like a better layout for forums. The choices that Paizo makes about what to fix, what to add, or what to upgrade are made with pretty careful consideration for how it might affect sales, the community, staff, how things might improve in the short term, and how it can scale up with long term needs. None of those are usually easy answers, and it's not perfect. As someone who does a significant amount of online shopping and perusal, Paizo's website is... pretty good, especially for a small business, and especially for a site that integrates a catalog, consignment, events, forums, organized play, and store. Many of the things in this thread are items we're considering. However, if we drop everything and change them right now in a few days, it would be irresponsible because it wouldn't let us consider long term effects throughly enough.
I've been with Paizo for just over 6 years, and have seen a significant amount of change with how we deal with the technological aspects of the company. In the last couple years we've added a position for a Technology Manager (Cort) who has helped the Tech Team develop a system for ensuring emergencies are dealt while still keeping track of the little changes and long term projects that need to be done. This has freed up our Senior Software Developer to focus on fixing and features which has resulted in a steady increase of improvements (some of which do not have visual impact, but are nonetheless very important).
One thing that has not changed is how personally many of us take paizo.com. A number of the Paizo staff puts forth so much heart and soul into building and maintaining the site, its content, and providing the best service we can. It is difficult to digest demands or certain suggestions because its not easy to totally understand the infrastructure and surrounding elements unless you're actually working physically in our office. But, Paizo staff actively read the forums and we are listening. Sometimes its hard to find good responses when we can't talk about all the details that might be relevant due to security or proprietary reason, but we are actively reading and staying aware of what feedback community members have.
If you do have thoughts or feedback, we would love to engage in conversation with you! What would be helpful for our respective teams is: let us know what you think could be improved, suggestions you've seen other sites do that you like, or any ideas for paizo.com in the future to incorporate. Engaging in dialogue is much much more inviting and effective when we can answer questions rather than respond to demands.
From the perspective of inside the building, I'm so excited for what this Humble Bundle exposure has brought to our community. We have an opportunity to introduce new folks to the gaming table. For many of us, gaming has been an amazing experience and wonderful hobby. I've found some of my best friends by sitting around a table rolling dice and I am thrilled at the chance to meet more.
~sara marie
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I've been with Paizo for just over 6 years
No way. I can't imagine a Saramarieless Paizo. :/
First let me say that I love you guys at Paizo and I want to thank you for your hard work. PF is my favorite RPG and I get a lot of enjoyment out of the forums through my PbP games. Again, thank you!
I can accept that the site is bogged down by a promotion but the fact remains that even when there no abnormal traffic due to a promotion, this site is down...a lot.
It is very common (and frustrating) for me to check on one of my PbP games and the site bugs out and fails to load. It happens all the time, far more often than it probably should, far more often than literally any other website I have ever regularly visited.
Interesting, Zedth. Other than the recent, I've rarely had significant problems with the website. Could there be something else going on in your case?
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System Administrator
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For the past week or two before humble bundle, we'd found a significant problem and it had impacted the site pretty heavily during those couple of weeks. Also, the humble bundle thing has given us a lot of insight into our weak spots on the site and we've been fixing things here and there so that once we aren't receiving quite as much traffic, the site should be much more stable. We would not have been nearly as stable as we were without that one fix and unfortunately that went in the day before of the day of the Humble Bundles release. So that's the best update I can give to you right now. I've been working on getting some of the things that I can get done and fixed done and that's not insignificant BUT it's also not something that's easy to show right now.
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While not a design or computer expert, I will say as a customer I like the Paizo web site. It could be a bit better, but it functions quite well for my needs.
As for hostility and ridicule from board veterans, please keep in mind from their point of view: someone who has been here a few minutes comes in and puts out a variation of "this place sucks and I know better than you".
It doesn't exactly make people sing your praises or look upon you in a good way, even if you may be correct.
As long as we're airing grievances about the site in a forum that so many of the admin staff is in...
There's really only three things about the Paizo site that drive me crazy, and they are pretty much all Play By Post related.
1) The Postmonster. Having posts get eaten by some arbitrary timeout is pretty maddening. The amount of time it takes for the site to decide it doesn't care about your post anymore seems to be random. I really should have to resort to copy/pasting every post I make or using Lazarus just in case the site decides it's hungry. I have no suggestions on ways to fix this because I have no idea what causes it, but I'd really like to see it go away forever.
2) The timeout on avatar selection. There's a lot of avatars. Going through them takes time. Having the security features log me out and boot me from avatar selection when I move to the next page is awful. Adding a feature to let me choose how long I want to remain logged in would be great. "Keep me logged in" should definitely be an option. If I'm on the site I don't want to have to re-log in every time I go to my downloads or my account.
3) The one hour edit timer. I get it for the majority of the site. For Play By Post games, it's a pain. I would love to see the play by post forums have longer edit windows. Maybe a day, or a week, rather than an hour.
Other than those issues, I love the site. I've never had a problem with navigations, searches or interface.
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Also, if you don't like how complex and text-heavy the website is, you're going to hate the game system...
I do overall like the website but I think the left menubar and the top menubar have some weird overlap/redundancy and are organized differently, and the center tiles on the main homepage could be organized a little better and the things they lead to could maybe be simplified a bit.
Seriously people. What's up with those flamer guitars? We clearly need flamer bagpipes!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-Op1Mng4oY
I'm sort of confused at the complaints some have. I'm not the oldest here, and relatively, new compared to many.
I also am much more of a Computer illiterate compared to many here in some ways...
But most of the site was easily figured out by me on the first visit within the first 30 seconds.
I don't know how to make avatars, or do fancy things like that (still), but I can certainly find my way around the store (even buying things there) or the message boards.
I do call in for help when I need it though, but I wouldn't think the site is that confusing or terrible.
At least they HAVE forums (and aren't afraid of their customers like WotC), a store, and other amenities not available at other places (like the aforementioned WotC).
FWIW, I've been here a fair while and I can sympathise with the newcomers.
The paizo store was super confusing to me (and I still screw things up from time to time). The most recent update to the look which introduced all the friendly buttons made things worse, imo (I still tend to forget that last stage I need to do to finalise my order). Plus there's the inevitable "I've been charged twice" issue arising from the authorisation process which does seem to be an idiosyncracy of Paizo's.
Finding products is not always easy either. (Imagine thinking "I wonder what the early flipmats looked like" and trying to chase them down - now that some are being rereleased as PDFs the "most recent" function is not really helpful). All in all, I find the store is pretty bad for just random browsing, personally.
The downloads section and process is hard to understand, doesnt sort very well (though that's probably less of an issue with newcomers) and took me quite sometime to even find.
I like the messageboards compared to the other site I used to post at regularly. I personally prefer lots of text and no pop-up windows, scrolling advertisments and other things I imagine constitute modern web design. Stuff can always be improved, but I hope the tech team continue to focus on making it easy, rather than using the latest gadgets just because they can.
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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.
Also, when someone new comes into a room where there are already some people and basically tells them that room sucks, chances are people won´t cheer him.
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.
Otherwise known as "disagreement".
<pause>
I suppose that makes it "ridicule and disagreement".
Yes, this is meant to be funny.
I don't about you guys, but I'm excited about those upcoming flame decals.
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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.
I can find stuff when I know what I want. However, I'm more likely to think "I'm running a game in Varisia - what products would be useful" and I find it hard to browse the site for that kind of thing. The same issue arises if I want to look at "third party game worlds" or similar. I'm pretty much faced with a huge number of PF-compatible publishers, most of whom have only put out a handful of product.
The actual checkout procedure is very counter-intuitive to me. As is the policy of placing a temporary hold on funds which looks like a charge and then charging the full amount on shipment. I understand the reasons behind it, but the fact remains it's pretty unusual - most online stores you select what you want, select your payment method and then pay for it.
Hopefully there's an ancillary benefit to the over-the-top humble bundle response in that Paizo get lots of feedback from new customers and that can feed into their web design. There's obviously no point in changing just for change's sake, but I don't think improvement is out of the question.
I can find stuff when I know what I want. However, I'm more likely to think "I'm running a game in Varisia - what products would be useful" and I find it hard to browse the site for that kind of thing.
Search "products" for Varisia. I got at least seven pages of hits, most of which seem useful for your purpose.
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I can find stuff when I know what I want. However, I'm more likely to think "I'm running a game in Varisia - what products would be useful" and I find it hard to browse the site for that kind of thing.Search "products" for Varisia. I got at least seven pages of hits, most of which seem useful for your purpose.
An expansion of the Adventure Finder tool, from adventures to all the pathfinder setting products, would probably take care of this. Also, giving it a more prominent position on the main pagewould help.
-Skeld
Interesting, Zedth. Other than the recent, I've rarely had significant problems with the website. Could there be something else going on in your case?
I can rule out individual computer issues and router/modem problems because I experienced the same things from different computers/phones/locations.
FWIW your profile doesn't have that many posts and I see no PbP aliases, meaning that maybe you don't visit Paizo as often as I do? I PbP quite a bit which means that I check the forums often, daily. All I can say is that it is common (once or twice a week typically) that over a block of time (minutes up to hours) when I visit Paizo.com the browser times out and shows the "Paizo goblins computer bug technical difficulties" artwork indicating that the site is down for some reason. I have seen this for 2 years or so.
I love this site and it brings me large amounts of fun, so please don't take this as a complaint per se. I'm just pointing out that I've never seen another website that is down as often as Paizo.com, in light of the thread discussion.