Simplifying Your Site

[DRE]

How much time do you spend trying to make browsing and posting easier on your site? I seem to spend an extraordinary amount of time doing this. My younger members expect the site to be as easy as the apps they use on their mobile devices. Xenforo seems pretty simple to me, but for some noobs it can get too complicated. My friend's 16 year old daughter had issues uploading images and getting her 15 year old son to post a thread was even harder cause he ended up posting a blog instead and couldn't even embed the youtube vid right.

 

[Amaury]

Personally, I think XenForo's simple enough as it is.

 

[dvsDave]

Trying not to sound like a jerk, but seriously?! How does a 15 year old in this day and age have trouble using an interface this simple? On the other hand, facebook wisely doesn't not allow for virtually any formatting in posts, which might explain why a teen has no idea how to use a regular rich text editor... but that's a weak argument and I know it.

 

[DRE]

Yeah my brain hurts trying to break down stuff to make it easier. Sometimes I just give up and log out.

 

[LPH]

The majority of my 15 - 17 year old teenage students cannot use a keyboard based computer. They are accustomed to their smartphones and not the "older" desktop/laptop/notebook PC.

 

[Alpha1]

A large part of the success of a website is due to carefully watching user behavior and tweaking element after element. Consider how successful websites like Facebook tweak mini-elements constantly.
Its really amazing what a series of small tweaks can do to improve your traffic. Apply K.I.S.S. everywhere. Not only your users react to it, but search engines as well.
No platform will ever be exactly what your audience needs.

 

[DRE]

Looks like the main issue is speed.

 

[tommydamic68]

I will just add one thing here that hurt my site as far as image uploads via the community gallery which I offer on my site. The add on gallery I was first using with Xenforo did not have an option of auto resizing the photo a member uploaded, so what happened is, I have a max size image setting in the ACP of the gallery, so if a member exceeded this image size, due to the gallery add on not having an auto resize image, sort of like the attachments here on Xenforo it gave them the old error "image size too large" which forced them to find some program to "resize" the photo to upload it - they become frustrated and just moved on from adding images to the gallery at all. I now use this Gallery and it suits the communities needs to the fullest.

Moral of the story, make sure your add-ons are simplified and user friendly geared towards ease of use and speed - as the common apps and sites people use now a days like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Today, people want their websites like McDonalds - fast, cheap and easy…(and to work on their mobile phones.)

 

[MattW]

This is why I don't have any limits on images on my site (or post size etc). Content on my site is what I want, and not have them go elsewhere.

Storage and bandwidth are relatively cheap now, and it's not like people have 56k dial up anymore.

 

[Gazhyde]

This is why I don't have any limits on images on my site (or post size etc). Content on my site is what I want, and not have them go elsewhere.

Storage and bandwidth are relatively cheap now, and it's not like people have 56k dial up anymore.

I have this strategy, but I tend to auto resize images to a more reasonable size for ease of viewing.

We have some members in the depths of Scotland, with one in particular who struggles to view image heavy threads. He tends to give up looking at some threads.

He has broadband, but to be honest it's pretty poor and mainly I think to BT's network infrastructure. Got him to do a couple of Speedtests, one to his nearest datacentre and then one to London (where our datacentre is).



Then I got him to tracert to our server... and it was pretty dismal watching all the hops before it finally left BT, to get to the server.

 

[MattW]

Damn that is slow

Only thing I do change is to remove the full size images and replace them with the 600x600 thumbnails (to help with that sort of issue)

 

[Gazhyde]

How would I set that @MattW? Had a quick look through the obvious options in the ACP...

 

[MattW]

How would I set that @MattW? Had a quick look through the obvious options in the ACP...

Attachment options


I then edit the thread if they have inserted lots of full size images, and use the thumbnails instead.

 

[Gazhyde]

Perfect. I'll make that change, and then edit one of the threads and drop him a PM and get him to test!

 

[DRE]

What a great idea @MattW

 

[Gazhyde]

What a great idea @MattW

Agreed! Wonder if there is anyway to switch off full image, and only allow thumbnails to be inserted into posts.

 

[DRE]

Agreed! Wonder if there is anyway to switch off full image, and only allow thumbnails to be inserted into posts.

I think @AndyB has an addon for that but its really just a simple template edit.

 

[DRE]

I tried changing the attachment thumbnail size and while height wise it changes, it does not change width wise.

 

[MattW]

I tried changing the attachment thumbnail size and while height wise it changes, it does not change width wise.

Did you re-build all the thumbnails?

 

[DRE]

Yeah.