Anyone else besides me think that the TC website redesign has resulted in a downturn of X-Wing discussion on their site?

I find their new looks too fancy that it makes it harder to navigate their website.

At least compared to the old one.

It's tougher to navigate, and I miss the "latest comments" bar that used to keep good discussion flowing.

Yea I agree. I can see what they were trying to accomplish, but it feels more like a web store than anything.

The mobile experience is a lot better for purchasing stuff, but the articles are kind of a pain to get to now. The lack of a recent comments sidebar really just makes it feel dead.

On the other hand I just got some templates from them and they are excellent.

If you do not like their new version, send them feedback about it. The more people from whom they hear, the more likely we will get the old functionality back.

I agree. On the whole, the site is nice and feels like a nice web store but the articles are not easily viewable and the biggest loss is the loss of the recent posts sidebar that made things feel more like a forum. I think that has killed the discussion more than anything.

If you're logged in, all the recent articles are right there on the homepage.

And there's also a nice "Activity" section that shows the recent comments - did you guys miss this?

I am way more likely to use an RSS reader to get the content now. But my RSS on picks up Covenant posts at the moment. I like the look of the site, but content is harder to find, but easier to read.

I think the critical mass of commenters has dropped off too, which hurts the discussion more so than the style change.

I have found both iterations of their website counter intuitive. That said I lke the old one better.

When a company redesigns it's site - you can get a good indication of what their priorities are :\

They used to have forums and articles with comments. Each iteration since then has been harder to use. And they keep deleting my account.

I have never been a fan of their site. The same pictures on every blog topic made it hard to be lazy there... lol.

Meh.

Ugh. Not a fan of the redesign. I won't be going there nearly as often, if at all now.

I do like the quality of their products. I also order all my tokens and whatnot from them. The new website look does leave something to be desired. Navigating around the site is a little harder, and I have a problem logging into my account with them.

I know that my most recent article on their site got FAR less views, at least based on comments.

I feed on comments. I'm so hungry...

Part of me thinks all of that higher end discussion must have gone somewhere (probably not here, unfortunately). Where else are the usual subjects posting? AFM and Metal Bikini are pretty dead. I see bits and pieces in some places (Docking Bay 416, and even Reddit, for instance).

I feel like that one camper at the back of the troop. Guys? Guys? Where'd everybody go?

There's something not going well with their new design. It's hard to put a finger on it exactly. There's also the phenomenon of whatever the change is, people will complain about it, then might get used to it. See every major revision of facebook's interface. It always has created a huge wave of negative comments and then people get used to it. I'm confident the interface will grow on many people, but not all.

I post every update in painful detail of the vassal module. I had gotten used (which I shouldn't!) to a certain level of generous people spontaneously deciding that the vassal module was worth a small tip. I poured my heart out on the last one, much more than a lot of updates I've put out. I have been solving a difficult problem and been spending hours upon hours of non-intuitive trial and error fine tuning to bring the latest features. I think I broke the record on the lowest amount of donations I got for it, since I posted about it not long after TC's website redesign. I tend to use TC as a launch announcement platform, though I also post on various other x-wing community websites, fb groupes, g+ community, etc. They all link back to my TC blog post, though, to get the full details of the module changes.

Again, I stress that the donations are perfectly optional and I'm mainly happy to get the new module of vassal into the hands of my potential adversaries and in my own, since I use the module a LOT as a player. As long as I'll be able to find games and that the player base finds it worthy to humor me and download & install new updates as they come out, my goal is accomplished. Donations is just a measure stick that I can use to support this thread's topic - yeah, people are visiting the site much less now.

Totally Agree! I don't like it

The new site kinda sucks. The old site wasn't perfect, but it was denser. The new design has way too much white space and it is far harder to see things without scrolling. The old site allowed your to see the newest blog entries on the main site without doing much of anything, they were just there at a glance along with the latest activity on a section to the right. It was quick and super easy to see what was going on at a glance and what you were interested in. Now, they have an unneeded giant picture heading, so you can only see 1 blog entry on the main "Read" page. If you scroll down, you can still only see 4-5 blog entries per page. And the recent activity is hidden and buried somewhere else that is never easy to find. And none of the intersite navigation is very intuitive.

I love the teamcovenant community, it's easily one of the best xwing groups on the web, but I think the redesign is a total failure. It wouldn't surprise me if another site springs up to take it's place, which is a total shame. I have to think their Xwing traffic has decreased by a large percentage.

Not only is the end result of the redesign a failure, but the switch over was inexplicably full of errors and set backs.

They should honestly revert back to the original site, I'm not sure I ever understood what was really wrong with it.

The problem is that the redesigned site takes a lot of effort to get to the articles and keep up with the conversation.

The old website had the content I wanted to see covering the screen (in a badly designed clunky way, but one I was used to) while the new website forces me to scroll down a whole page past advertising for a product that I'm not interested in. Then when I get to the content, I have to click activity to see what everyone is saying, and then I have to click through to read anything longer than two sentences. I can't even use the /read page because there is still an annoying banner taking up the top of the page and no activity feed.

Not to mention that the mobile site is completely unusable thanks to how much scrolling I have to do, and I get automatically logged out every 4-6 hours.

I'm not sure where the serious conversations will end up, but I'm also looking.

It used to be a daily stop for me. Now, I've mostly forgotten it exists.

Its pretty much crap. I hope they fix it.

Relevant input to this post:

http://teamcovenant.com/blog/2015/06/03/website-update-8/