I think it has been widely agreed that the new Landing page is a hollow nonfunctional advertisement to frequent users, but the worst part - in my opinion - is that the blog posts have been removed entirely. We already noticed the shift in priorities with blog posts in the last few months, lots of "buy this Partnered Content" or "Play this super specific genre of Partnered Content" type posts that I, personally, couldn't be less interested in, and there being fewer and fewer posts inviting users to get excited about certain subclasses, monsters and special Livestream events/giveaways. However I never imagined the blog being removed entirely and replaced with useless ad space.
The blog writers - probably laid-off, old blog posts - nowhere to be seen. This burning of culture and robbing us of our heroes in the name of greed is exactly the DRACONIC behavior we have spent years combating in our games and stories.
I expect this to cause many players to cancel their subscriptions and turn to *seafaring behavior*. Advertising does not generate profit, creating fans does. Losing fans certainly won't. Do better.
I will lend my voice to the impression that the new homepage is not much of an upgrade, as a first experience for me.
Firstly, the animated background is - in my view - undesirable. It makes it too busy on entry, and it increase the processor requirement - enough so that I can hear my computer's fans starting up when I get there - which is a sure indicator of it being poorly optimized.
Secondly, I think there's a lot of space being wasted, and I have to scroll down to get what I'm actually interested by, which are the News. I think it's an inconvenience to have to do 2 pagedowns to get to content that actually interests me. Not to mention, everything that precedes is old news to me, since I'm already a Master subscriber.
I read in an earlier news post that this tech for the homepage was modular, so, I would recommend that this dashboard enable a degree of customization so that it can be tailored to the user's experience.
Honestly, the most useful part of Dndbeyond is its black menu bar at the top. One big loss to me was the access to individual class spelllists when they were deprecated for larger class/background/species images, and that's why I use https://dnd5e.*******.com/ (I'll type a "5e wizard spells" seach on my address bar and generally find what I'm looking for faster than on this site) instead. The homepage's prime use for me was seeing news/blogs - losing ready access to something my eyes could quickly pick up is a net loss on any potential activity in the community you could have exposed me too, therefore, less marketing exposure... and if I want news I'll probably just look elsewhere.
I hope you can use this criticism to better serve your clientele. Better service means more clientele, means more money spent here because you're more worth it than elsewhere.
I think it has been widely agreed that the new Landing page is a hollow nonfunctional advertisement to frequent users, but the worst part - in my opinion - is that the blog posts have been removed entirely.
We already noticed the shift in priorities with blog posts in the last few months, lots of "buy this Partnered Content" or "Play this super specific genre of Partnered Content" type posts that I, personally, couldn't be less interested in, and there being fewer and fewer posts inviting users to get excited about certain subclasses, monsters and special Livestream events/giveaways. However I never imagined the blog being removed entirely and replaced with useless ad space.
The blog writers - probably laid-off, old blog posts - nowhere to be seen. This burning of culture and robbing us of our heroes in the name of greed is exactly the DRACONIC behavior we have spent years combating in our games and stories.
I expect this to cause many players to cancel their subscriptions and turn to *seafaring behavior*. Advertising does not generate profit, creating fans does. Losing fans certainly won't.
Do better.
I will lend my voice to the impression that the new homepage is not much of an upgrade, as a first experience for me.
Firstly, the animated background is - in my view - undesirable. It makes it too busy on entry, and it increase the processor requirement - enough so that I can hear my computer's fans starting up when I get there - which is a sure indicator of it being poorly optimized.
Secondly, I think there's a lot of space being wasted, and I have to scroll down to get what I'm actually interested by, which are the News. I think it's an inconvenience to have to do 2 pagedowns to get to content that actually interests me. Not to mention, everything that precedes is old news to me, since I'm already a Master subscriber.
I read in an earlier news post that this tech for the homepage was modular, so, I would recommend that this dashboard enable a degree of customization so that it can be tailored to the user's experience.
Honestly, the most useful part of Dndbeyond is its black menu bar at the top. One big loss to me was the access to individual class spelllists when they were deprecated for larger class/background/species images, and that's why I use https://dnd5e.*******.com/ (I'll type a "5e wizard spells" seach on my address bar and generally find what I'm looking for faster than on this site) instead. The homepage's prime use for me was seeing news/blogs - losing ready access to something my eyes could quickly pick up is a net loss on any potential activity in the community you could have exposed me too, therefore, less marketing exposure... and if I want news I'll probably just look elsewhere.
I hope you can use this criticism to better serve your clientele. Better service means more clientele, means more money spent here because you're more worth it than elsewhere.
Thank you for reading.
The homepage lacks any sort of elegance and looks like it was designed for a mall kiosk.