When you have a chance, swing by Petopia and take a gander at the new skin I uploaded tonight. I’ve been working on it off and on for awhile now, and I have to say I’m rather fond of it. But of course I want to hear what you think. *grin*
Important Note: If you are seeing any weirdness with things overlapping improperly or colors that don’t look like this picture to the left, try forcibly refreshing the page. (On Windows this is normally Ctrl+F5.) And next time I will remember to change the name of the stylesheet so that isn’t neccesary.
As usual there are a couple of caveats. You’ll notice that the pet pics look a bit out of place at the moment. I will probably start replacing them soon: certainly many of the pictures I added myself in the past year could stand to be a little better quality. (It took me a long time to figure out the Model Viewer well enough to get the best shots.)
I’ve also left out some bits of content temporarily while I wrestle them into shape. For example, all the taming guides are currently MIA, as is the “Surviving the First Nine Levels” article, but I hope to have much of that back up soon.
On the other hand, I was able to add some minor new functionality. Individual pet pages now have both a Thotbott and a Wowhead link, for instance, which I know will make you Wowhead lovers happy.
I also added a new overview page for pet families, with a new trial family organization that I’m sure will cause some discussion.
And there are other bits changed here and there. Take a poke around and see what you can find! The biggest plus in my eyes is that I once again like the look of the site — which means I’m more excited to add new content.
Incidentally, I did my best to make sure that everything renders properly in IE6, but there are a few known issues. The ghost saber image in the header has some odd black artifacting and I had to drop the King B image on the homepage entirely. I hope, however, that the site is usable in IE6 — if it’s not, please let me know and I’ll go beat my head against it some more.
And that goes for IE7, Firefox and Safari as well, of course. If you see anything amiss just let me know and I’ll swing into action.
And let me know what you think! I’m anxious to hear your thoughts.
(Aside: I went through a number of possible titles for this post. My favorites were the understated “Petopia Updated – Visibly” and the ironic “Petopia – Still Green!”)
I ttoally love the new layout for petopia! Good job! ^-^
The design is very cool, i just dont really like the eucalyptus color… if you kept the previous darker green, it would be PERFECT!
Good job!
I love the new layout! Wow! The site really has a lot of pop now. Great job.
The lay-out is great. The quick jump selections are great. The color…ummm…not so much.
Very very cool. I like the King B and Ghost saber images on the homepage – very nice.
Good work!!
LOVE the layout.
Personally I think the shade of green seen in the background of the pet pictures is better, but that’s me.
(Disclosure: In any context– green is never one of my top colors, anyway.)
I don’t really like the new layout, the look is great but I liked the quick links on the side for pet families better then the drop down list, not to mention the adds on the side over lap the other tiger..
I like the clean look, the green color is growing on me, and I will get used to the new layout.
Great job Mania!
AH! What happened to my Petopia!
:p The new design is very simple and easier to follow than the old one. It looks great and should be easier for newer users to understand and get use to.
Slick. Nice color scheme, bit more organized, and less clutter. Delicious.
And holy cow, thanks for the wowhead links! Copy-pasting all the time to use the site I wanted to was starting to get to me.
ok, the layout is nice. in firefox and safari the right column adds overlap the cat at the bottom. I’d rather see cats :)
I don’t mind the color actually, enjoy it more than the dark green of the old page. Petopia is a users paradise – there are reasons for coming, and jumping to them are key (skills, types, etc). That you have that upfront is good, efficient (as it was before).
petopia is one of those links I put at the top of all my browsers. thanks for all the efforts
I had one idea and I have no idea how it could be set up, but it would be nice to be able to compare pet families side by side. This way, one could compare, say, a Boar with a Warp Stalker without having to go up and down the table all the time.
It’s just and idea.
ah I see – if I manually resize both browsers the ad stays in it’s little column and the cat migrates to the light green under the message. if my browser windows are not wide enough, then there’s overlap.
oddly on firefox, I had a horizontal bar to shift to the right. On the Safari browser I did not. hmmm
shibumi the inept
I like the new look. I do kind of miss the direct links to various pet families that used to be on the left side.
And no more Mazzranache on the front page? Aww! My pet Peck is going to be disappointed!
I like the new look but I must take offense to the leaving out of boars from “Recommended Pets.” I understand for end game content they aren’t the best choice, but that’s only a portion of the WoW experience. For my money, and rare in my experience is the hunter who will disagree, nothing gets you from 10-70 faster and more easily than a boar by your side. Granted time will tell if the charge/growl controversy introduced in 2.4 will change that, but as of now I believe it’s definitely true.
Also as an aside, maybe to keep the controversy to a minimum you should change to a more tangible way of defining pet categories. I believe you did this in the past, but maybe having some sort of more firmly established categories such as DPS, Tank, and other.
I love the new theme :) It’s much more streamlined than it was previously.
A bigh thumbs up here, even for the colour ;)
Adam W-
I was thinking something along those lines, but I wasn’t sure about saying this. I’ve never liked the idea of a given pet being ‘recomended’. A long time ago, before TBC, the site was divided into DPS, Tank, and Mainline pets, but that changed with TBC and the changes made to the pets. I kind of miss that.
Actually I don’t see the need to divide them at all. If you could put the pet family starts (i.e. for Cats, DPS: +10%, AR: +0%, HP: -2%), next to the family type you can just put them in alphabetical order.
Or yeah divide them into DPS, Tank, Caster,and other. (still having the stats on the front page would be nice)
“If some god somewhere had said ‘let there be light’ in Ankh-Morpork, he would not have gotten any further because someone would have yelled out ‘what colour?’”
LOL. Perhaps the best way to put it is not Recomended, but Most Popular, Popular, Least Popular/Rare to see.
Both the new layout and the lighter color are great. And I have no issue with the Big Three heading the page. It’s not a war on crocolisk lovers or anything, it’s just common sense :)
The one thing I would like to see is the individual pet skin pictures in each category be put against a lighter background as well. Since the thumbnails are so small and they still have the old dark green background it’s pretty hard to see the pets without clicking through, thereby sort of negating the purpose of having thumbnails in the first place. Minor quibble though, and perhaps the clarity of the thumbnails is better on other monitors/monitor settings than mine.
Mania – Fan-faulking-tastic job! I love it. Now, when are you going to make a non-Combat pet section. :-)
Do you know Flash? I noticed that they Gallery loads image by image and I was thinking that with Flash, you could have them all pre-load and fall into place all at once. Just a thought.
Love the new layout. Very clean.
Poped on to Petopia (Before I checked the blog) to see what pets I could get in Darkshore… WOW!
Love it, clean and pretty and I find the color just fine. The King B and Ghost Saber art is a great match, too! (I was never fond of the old forest green color, by the way….)
Good job!
/applaudes
It looks terrific! I love it!
Arides-
We know it isn’t a war on Crocolisk lovers, if you can find them. The problem is that it isn’t common sense. Wind Serpents are just as highly recomended as Cats, Raptors and Ravagers because of their higher than average DPS and Lightning Breath which is a high damage spell skill that benifits from spell damage boosts and ignores armor. Not to mention the fact that Wind Serpents do a lot of front end aggro with LB. Cats, Raptors and Ravagers are just a lot more common than Wind Serpents.
Great work!!! Thanks sooo much for all your continued effort and love that you show the Hunter cvommunity!
After having gone through a few sections I’d say that I like the layout… not thrilled with the color though.
I guess that the tables had the headers included in the middle to make it easier to read but I’m not liking the break… call it a pet peeve.
I like the arrangement of the pet families (except for the arguments it’ll bring up concerning the recommended families…) especially the small images… are those new?
Overall, great job!
for some reason, my Firefox is definitely NOT showing the new petopia the way your screenshot is showing it.
That aside, I do like the new layout (going by the screenshot).
I’ll write more when I have time and describe the various multitude of differences between the SS and what i’m seeing on petopia
I love the green layout. I like the more centralized main page with the news in a box on the right, and the different search functions all together.
I’d venture that any form of comparison will be subjective to the reader. I like reading the specs to determine if a family type is what I want, though I have to admit sometimes the flying (irritating flap flap flap) and large (giant bear butts) tend to get me avoiding them.
However, I regularly use petopia to enrich my skills – and that means I’m going to tame just about anything out there, to get the skills I want/need. Knowing that I can snag a glance on Petopia to determine that is a lifesaver.
Seidouyumi,
Agreed, that’s a good point. Wind Serpents do much better with specific combinations of builds and stats, though, and are not as common at all leves as cats and raptors are (Ravagers are hard to come by early on for Horde, so that may be a good argument against their being “recommended”). It depends on the purpose, I suppose; I saw the “recommended” category as being a sort of reference for the “I’m a new hunter who just dinged 10, what should I get?” visitor more than a “You must have one of these or FAIL” message for everyone. That latter POV–that’s only Blizzard’s :P
I think the functionality of it is great, but I liked the old color better :(
Just my opinion.
I like the new layout and functions, but not fond of the color choice there, sorry. *grin* Then again, like someone else said, greens have never been my favorites anyways. Overall wonderful job, and love how much you do for the Hunter community. Keep up the great work!
Thanks for the feedback so far everyone!
Quick question for those that are seeing the ads overlap the right hand side of the page: Do me a favor and try forcibly refreshing to pick up the changed stylesheet. (On Windows this is normally Ctrl+F5). If you are still seeing things overlap, please comment again and let me know what version of Firefox you are using. Thanks!
(I’ll be back to discuss more of the feedback later. Functionality bugs first. :>)
I like the color – especially having a lighter background.
I agree with Nepthys and Boven – I miss not having the quick links to the pets right there.
Also, probably the number one way I use Petopia now is to search for which pets have particular skills (for training up my pets.) It took me a bit of searching around to see where you had moved that to. It be helpful to see that back more front-and-center.
Finally, I have to agree that I don’t think classifying some pets as “recommended” is the best choice. (And this despite that I have a cat as my main pet.) Maybe a name change … (the “Most Popular,” etcetera suggestion; or DPS, Tank, Balanced, etcetera) (If there is a need to classify, I personally lean towards an “abilities” type of classification.)
Still, as always thanks for all of the work and effort you put into the site. You’re my number one resource as a hunter!
Mania,
I use foxfire and I get the layout issue and refreshing the page in seems to work, but then i don’t get the overlap every time either
Varsar: You should only have to force refresh once, I believe. Let me know if you have to do it more than once.
Verace et al: Power user tip: Type the name & rank of the skill you want in the “Search the Pet Database” input box on the home page. to go directly to Advanced Search with pets that have that skill. For example, if you type “Bite 9″ and hit return, you’ll see that there are three tameable pets with Bite 9.
Real power user tip: You can use ‘and’ to link multiple search terms from that box on the home page, although the functionlaity is limited by the functionality of the Advanced Search itself. For example, “bread and damage” results in a search for pets that eat bread and have a high damage mod, but “bread and meat” results in a search for pets that eat meat because the Advanced Search page can’t search on multiple diets. (Not yet, anyway.)
In terms of layout, I haven’t had any problems. The main screen is a bit bigger than my window, but that’s alright, it just means I can’t see the advert.
refressh (or resizing) works for me.
a new start on safari showed the correct results. Safari is keeping cookies and other kruft. Firefox flushes everything on restart.
Site looks awesome! Keep up the amazing work.
W00t!
Good job – layout and colors are great. Oh! By the way – if you are gonna link Wowhead along with Thottbot (good on ya) why not Allakhazam as well?
Very nice, take’s a little adjusting, but I am impressed! *Laughs*
As for ‘most popular’ pet’s or what have you, that’s never been to hard. Just look at what the crowd’s using. Ravager’s, Cat’s, Scorpid’s, and to a lesser degree Wind Serpent’s. The first two are widely considered the best of the DPSers ((Despite raptor’s having the same DPS rating, and now having bite, claw, AND dash)) the second is considered the ‘mana drain mask’ of the arena, and the third being a form of specialized DPS pet, with it’s only downside being the rather large cost of lightning breath. Many if not most high end boar’s are stabled or released at seventy, no offense to any boar hunter’s, because of the popular belief that “DPS makes right”.
Mania – very nice! A very unique color scheme and it offsets the dark pet screenshot pic thumbnails well.
Looks great! And I like green, so I’m not really tempted to camp some obscure corner of the internets to tame the rare spawn version in alternate colors. :)
Love the new look! The ghost saber & king b pics are great. Thanks for all the hard work. This website is such a great resource & looks smooth too! :)
the only problem i have is i have a hard time seeing the pictures of the pets with the black back ground in the thumbnails
Really not a fan of the color but really am a fan of the new layout. I especially like the little icons on the pet families page.
Two additional thing’s. First off, why so many off green hater’s? Second, Mania, or anyone else with a ravager, does gore’s double damage count as a critical? I was always under the impression that gore had the chance to do double, but that didn’t count as a critical.
Heh. In response to recommending pet families, great job. Recommended, popular, and exotic. You must have agonized over what word to use other than ‘mostly useless’ for a long time.
I still love my crab.