OpenRA/OpenRAWeb

Homepage designed to showcase gameplay, features and download links

kingo55 opened this issue · 3 comments

I think we can make the homepage and navigation more enticing for new users. Here's a quick wire frame I whipped up:

homepage

The current design is very text heavy and relies on the user reading through quite a bit of text. If we can be more succinct, more users will read our content and get engaged. Meanwhile, the clear download links by OS should help users on OSX/Linux get interested in it.

I basically went with a layout similar to Battlefield's site. However VLC's cross-platform download button also looks rather cool too: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html

Thoughts?

I'm not sure how the download links could work here, can you add more detail to the mockup?

We offer multiple downloads for Windows/macOS/Debian (currently release vs playtest, but eventually also a separate installer for the public TS alpha), while the other five platforms don't offer any downloads, but instead instructions or external links.

I was thinking we could link the logos to the download page with a hash parameter in the URL (e.g.#platform) to link users to the appropriate platform downloads/instructions.

That way you don't need to update too many places whenever a release goes out. But we still make the download links as clear as possible.

Any other feedback before I update the wireframes / Am I on the right track?

The proposed layout reminds me a bit of https://cncnet.org/ and https://openrct2.website/ but I am not sure if we need to try so hard to get people to play the game and advertise the default mods, whose content we don't own and only have limited redistribution rights although that probably is covered by the EA terms that we are allowed to make "let's play" videos on YouTube. Maybe it should be centered on the engine and it's focus on moddability like we currently try to.