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GW has a new website, I noticed recently. The thing that made it obvious was the gateway splash page which has cool new art on it. For years I have accessed the GW US site online by typing www.gamesworkshop.com and letting the browser resolve it. Now I get a totally new page.

Anyone else noticed this and what do you think?

I often use the mail order pages as references, and I use to look at the bits on those pages by clicking the little wrench, we all know the bits are gone but I still like to look at t he art when I do my units for reference, thing is, it isnt there... I couldn't even find a link for the "online store" like there use to be.

You have to follow the "army links" to get to the pages and there is a TON of javascript. Overall I felt the site performance was awful, the art was buried. (Primary clicks only take you to a huge list of units and there is not art so all you see is text and links). The structure was cumbersome and the site navigation was confusing and irritating. I couldn't get over the impression that the whole thing had been designed a little amateurishly solely to entice the virgin player.

I also had difficulty locating the community sections I use to easily access, I suppose some of that is just newness.

Any one else find it really lacking?

PS

Still really upset about bits not being accessible online, Looking at the "Conversion kits" which were sprues for the most part was laughable compared to the old website where all the kits were "explode able" with the wrench...

What say you?

* Further investigation on clicking unit details did show full color images, with zoom feature which was cool. But the interim splash pages are all just text now... Hmm.

oh yea, and after 15 minutes of surfing I couldn't find any way to see the pieces in the kits formerly known as bits... (Lame)

Well, the first thing about it that made me happy was the fact that they finally have an Irish section. It was a pain to have to go and look at a non-English website to get euro prices, and sterling conversion often doesn't work since GW like to rip off their euro customers.
Took them far too long to do it, but at least they finally did. (It was worse when we were on punts, and there was no website with our currency)

As for overall design, it'll take time to get used to it. It seemed bland and uninteresting though. I don't like the way everything is layed out, it seems much more product focused and less content filled. Not that they old site had a huge amount of content mind you, just a little bit more than this one seems to. I'm not sure I like the "featured product" bits either...
I didn't spend too long on it though.

It's very slow to navigate. That's my biggest complaint. I love the "zoom in feature," though. I miss the little wrench icon, too, but considering it hasn't been working consistently for years now, I don't miss it much.

Keep in mind that its still being finished, so we can still hope. *gives up hope*

On the UK version they were quoting Necron warrior box sets to be £35.00! I mean come on, I know GW is over priced but thats just wrong (in both senses)

The new layout confuses me and it seems a lot more focused on selling things at first glance. It would have been nice if we'd been given a bit of warning.

We were given a bit of warning.

All of the prices are the US$ prices; they just change the currency symbol. Everything really costs the same as it did before.

Thats funny, internationalization by chnging the currency symbol.

Maybe they should playtest their website! ROFL.

In retrospective I poked around some more and I was able to enjoy the artwork I was looking for previously, with a new zoom feature.

The navigation and performance is legitimately worse though, and I could never shale the feeling that it has been exclusively designed to sell things to new players.

Which I guess is where it is at.

Ah well. At least the zoom art is neat!

It was one of the features I asked for when they did that survey, so you can feel free to thank me.

I try to avoid the site at all cost now! It's super slow and I keep getting script errors when I use Mozilla firefox. Ugh, it' so annoying! Plus it doesn't seem all that intuitive and I have found myself getting lost trying to find my way around the site. I liked the old site much better, it was rather intuitive and better to navigate than this new piece of junk!

I have no complaint about their site focusing on selling product. Afterall, that's what it's for isn't it? The speed, though, is absolutely horrific. That alone keeps me from browsing... well, that and the fact that I refuse to pay retail for my GW habit.

* Why the hell are the FW IA books on the site, but not available for ordering?

Absolutely Horrific is an understatment... Kinda like trying to get FW on the phone...

Is it just me, or is the new layout less newb friendly? Seems that the way it WAS laid out, you clickedon an army, and it brought up miniturized pictures of ALL the differet units you could buy, click on those for details. This way, you go straight from a pictureless meu to a picture of an individual unit. Seems that it takes the "window-shopping" out of it quite a bit.

Anyone else get this impression, or am I in my usual minority of one?

Oh, and trying to load this hog of a site up over a satellite connection is a great revival of the World Wide Wait.

grizgrin wrote:...less newb friendly? Seems that the way it WAS laid out, you clickedon an army, and it brought up miniturized pictures of ALL the differet units ...straight from a pictureless meu to a picture of an individual unit. Seems that it takes the "window-shopping" out...

Yes I think you are right. I got that impression too, plus it seemed the obvious pitches for "Recommended unit" was awfully "used car salesman" to me, just let me look around...? Ya know?

Agreed, it seems like alot of effort to improve something, then just make it worse. You'd have thought they could have just improved the current one instead wouldn't you-keeping the same layout and all

Pariah Press wrote: It was one of the features I asked for when they did that survey, so you can feel free to thank me.

It's also one of the reasons that the site is slow as frozen molasses, should we thank you for that aspect as well? As long as we are freely giving praise that is..

Augustus: Yeah, I know. In India, that ocncept of just looking around at merch is unheard of. I go into a store, and I have a bunch of people following me around asking me what I want ot buy, or trying to sell me stuff. It gets annoying about as soon as the funny wears off, which is taking less and less time these days. I tend to be a loneranyway, last thing I want i some pushy little maggot trying to make quota or commission by pushing me into a sale. Think not, home-boy.

Storm Lord: I'm trying to figure out WHY they would have done such things? Did they follow some kind of online store trend? I know GW has a rep for making some absolutely bonkers business decisions in some circles, but I am of a fim belief tat all their policies should be expected to push their model sales. I just can't figure out why they thought some of these things would do achieve that...

two_heads_talking wrote:It's also one of the reasons that the site is slow as frozen molasses, should we thank you for that aspect as well? As long as we are freely giving praise that is..

I can assure you that the "zoom" feature is not what's slowing down the site. Such a feature could easily be implemented with regular HTML, which wouldn't slow anything down. The site appears to be coded really inefficiently with AJAX, from what I can ascertain. It's positively bloated.

Oh, I agree with boosting model sales, its a business after all, it's just its made it harder for me to actually find what I want-in terms of their other articles they used to have.

If they could ahve done both, it would have been nice

grizgrin wrote:Augustus: Yeah, I know. In India, that ocncept of just looking around at merch is unheard of. I go into a store, and I have a bunch of people following me around asking me what I want ot buy, or trying to sell me stuff. It gets annoying about as soon as the funny wears off, which is taking less and less time these days. I tend to be a loneranyway, last thing I want i some pushy little maggot trying to make quota or commission by pushing me into a sale. Think not, home-boy.

Then you should stay out of Hobby Centers.

And people wonder why I am always saying change is BAD!

Le Grognard: I hated those places.


Edited for sharing violation. 5 yard penalty on me.

This site is a pain. I keep getting script and timeout errors every 4 or so clicks using Safari!

Added to this frustration, I can't find any black gobbo articles. Well grouped BG advertising used to cause more interest for me in a new army, but now I have to browse the specific army section to find stuff. Seems like a good marketing avenue was eliminated to me.