What happened to the plans...

[BigBlue1]

This is the section where suggestions to make the site better are supposed to be put, so I'll just jump in and not sugar coat it...

From what was posted on the site when you started, it sounded like you had plans to keep growing it into something to be proud of, a legacy to hand down. Now it looks like you have just sort of grown tired and stopped improving anything at all. The 'downloads' page was supposed to keep growing and have new content constantly added to it, there has been none.
The 'about us' page hasn't been touched in 5 years...it looks outdated and it is.
A lot of links are broken, dead, or go nowhere at all, some are to files that no longer exist.
There are code errors and spelling and grammatical errors everywhere.

Here are a few things that could be done to improve the site by making it look cleaner, more organized and more streamlined.

• Delete the old dead links on the downloads page and I'd also delete the page if you don't intend to keep it fresh.
• The link to OC3D.tv is just a link to YouTube? Why not embed the videos in your own site? Skip directing your traffic offsite to YouTube, once folks go to YouTube they will be there clicking videos of mermaid sightings and perpetual motion machines for days.
• The Content page is rather cluttered and disorganized looking, maybe 2 separate pages for (1.) (Tech) News and (2.) (Tech) Reviews would work better.
• I'd dump the vBulletin board and put your own board (using your own code) on the site directly. vBulletin is dated looking these days, and a custom board can look (and be) more integrated into the site.
• The 'related content' at the bottom of the page has no new content, the latest was in 2009! I'd lose that whole section, it just looks bad and makes the site seem lazy.
• The 'about us' page is 5 years old and lists your current PC as: Asus Rampage II Extreme, i7 965, 6gb OCZ Blade 2133, 2x 120gb OCZ Vertex Raid 0, OCZ Gold 1000w, 2x 5870 CrossfireX, Asus Xonar, Z5500’s, 3x Samsung T240 and shows a blurry photo of you with uncombed hair...I know you have a better, more recent photo and you might even have upgraded your PC by now.
• The link for 'legal' is a 404 not found...
• The link for 'awards' shows awards you created, not any that the site has won.
• When running the (oc3d) Home page through the w3c validator, you get 19 errors and 3 warnings, you need to take a minute to clean up the code here to look better in validator (and thereby be more accessible across more platforms). And 'Home' isn't the only one, the forum index alone has 28 errors and 4 warnings on it as well, every single page has a lot of errors. I'd go through the code line by line and fix it all up nicely.
• The 'newsletter' link on the 'content' page is a link back to the content page... it goes nowhere.
• Proofread!! There are a large number of typos on the site that need to be corrected, take a few minutes and read word by word all of the content to see what I mean. Examples: Gold Award description: ...and the award is generally reserved until we have believe that we have reviewed a good... Correction: omit the word 'have', Bronze award description: ...product is still strong in the areas that it matters most. Correction: change 'it matters' to 'matter'
  Gamer's choice award description: ...product offers such an improvement to a users gaming experience Correction: 'user's' with apostrophe...
  There are a lot of such instances and these 3 are from one page without a lot of text, many are grammatical and many are spelling errors but all need attention.

I hope you don't take this the wrong way and ban me for offering suggestions to improve your site. You might do well to hire a full time coder if you don't have the time to do it yourself. Or you could hire a freelancer for each job and pay as you go.
I hope you will consider these things that you can do now to improve your site without a lot of investment.
I look forward to seeing the site improve over the coming days.

Your friend,
Blue

 

[Excalabur50]

There are already plans for an overhaul of the site Tom has spoken about it in numerous videos, but like everything it takes time and finances

 

[Wraith]

Ouch BB1 shots fired :lol: You have indeed been a busy bee, as Excalabur50 has said there are changes in the works, including the site overhaul. We all as members do our very best to contribute and keep our own personal threads up to date, some of us also run advice, OC and modding how to threads, which I think we do a damn good job at, most of us do this in our own spare time and we also do this for nothing.

TTL gives us the reviews and we give our input with extras

 

[SparkleDJackson]

Fair enough about the front page and about us etc but the forum is a forum. It's got what you need. Cells of text and a button to hit next page.

It's perfect.

 

[BigBlue1]

Ouch BB1 shots fired :lol: You have indeed been a busy bee, as Excalabur50 has said there are changes in the works, including the site overhaul. We all as members do our very best to contribute and keep our own personal threads up to date, some of us also run advice, OC and modding how to threads, which I think we do a damn good job at, most of us do this in our own spare time and we also do this for nothing.

TTL gives us the reviews and we give our input with extras

Nono, that isn't the point, I like the site and would love to see it fixed up a bit here and there. I am not talking about a complete overhaul, (I don't think that's necessary at all) just a little maintenance and some sprucing up, nothing that major. The wc3 code errors have nothing to do with the posts themselves, it's about how the page is assembled, and in truth 19 or 28 errors is a very good score, look at some sites...Sony.com (69 errors), Microsoft.com (533 errors), corsair.com (219). So it would actually only take about 25 minutes to run the code and fix the errors here. the other items would take a few hours to proofread the site, not the posts made by members, just the actual site overclock3d.net. Deleting the dead ends and outdated stuff would take another hour or so. It isn't hard to do at all if you are the one that built the site and have the files.

cheers

 

[MadShadow]

Theres not much point as there is going to be a complete overhaul anyway. As for vBullitin, I like it. I've seen many other forums that use other software, but this will always remain my favorite.

 

[WYP]

An overhaul has been planned for a while now, the problem is cost and time. Everyone who works at OC3D comes from different parts of the UK, with TTL being the only full-time employee.

As for the downloads page and about us. We have been working on a new downloads page, it is coming.

 

[tinytomlogan]

Oh mr high and mighty is at it again.... sigh.

I cant imagine you have many friends in real life.

 

[BigBlue1]

So much for trying to help with suggestions. lol

 

[tinytomlogan]

So much for trying to help with suggestions. lol

You act like I dont know any of the above....

 

[MadShadow]

Oh mr high and mighty is at it again.... sigh.

I cant imagine you have many friends in real life.

*ms ^_^

 

[SuB]

[*]Delete the old dead links on the downloads page and I'd also delete the page if you don't intend to keep it fresh.

A new page is in the works for this already.

[*]The link to OC3D.tv is just a link to YouTube? Why not embed the videos in your own site? Skip directing your traffic offsite to YouTube, once folks go to YouTube they will be there clicking videos of mermaid sightings and perpetual motion machines for days.

That's not how it works, videos *are* embedded here, but there is zero SEO/Link advantage to making this exclusively the case. You do not understand how this works.

[*]The Content page is rather cluttered and disorganized looking, maybe 2 separate pages for (1.) (Tech) News and (2.) (Tech) Reviews would work better.

This has been changed and adapted several times to allow for more content, it's not as easy as splitting it apart. The entire site is due for an overhaul but this takes time and money.

[*]I'd dump the vBulletin board and put your own board (using your own code) on the site directly. vBulletin is dated looking these days, and a custom board can look (and be) more integrated into the site.

Of course you would, have you ever built a bullet proof forum system to handle 100,000 users? vBulletin is dated, but this build is custom and has been adapted to be resistant to a lot of known bugs, it's been manually fixed in such a way that it's not worth the time to update it. Building a robust enough forum like the one you speak of costs, thousands of pounds and is *not* a priority.

[*]The 'related content' at the bottom of the page has no new content, the latest was in 2009! I'd lose that whole section, it just looks bad and makes the site seem lazy.

This is very dependent on where you are on the site, it does work properly in some places, it is however very buggy and was built by the previous site owner and I will freely admit is crap, however not easy to fix and requires time, money and a replacement that will work properly.

You have no idea how the underlying database of the site works, which is half of the issue, to completely reconstruct this is a nigh-on impossible task, but ultimately all of the 'bugs' to do with it cascade out into the finer points, including this one.

[*]The 'about us' page is 5 years old and lists your current PC as: Asus Rampage II Extreme, i7 965, 6gb OCZ Blade 2133, 2x 120gb OCZ Vertex Raid 0, OCZ Gold 1000w, 2x 5870 CrossfireX, Asus Xonar, Z5500’s, 3x Samsung T240 and shows a blurry photo of you with uncombed hair...I know you have a better, more recent photo and you might even have upgraded your PC by now.

This page was, again, made by the previous owner and hasn't been updated, I'll grant you that, but it's another thing that takes time and effort to fix.

[*]The link for 'awards' shows awards you created, not any that the site has won.

That's because the awards are awarded BY the site, not TO the site.

[*]When running the (oc3d) Home page through the w3c validator, you get 19 errors and 3 warnings, you need to take a minute to clean up the code here to look better in validator (and thereby be more accessible across more platforms). And 'Home' isn't the only one, the forum index alone has 28 errors and 4 warnings on it as well, every single page has a lot of errors. I'd go through the code line by line and fix it all up nicely.

Validators are old-school and mostly outdated, people love to plaster these badges around but to keep a site that WORKS in all browsers (from IE6 through to IE Edge, Chrome, Firefox etc etc etc) is impossible without breaking some w3c rules. You do not understand how this works if you think w3c validation will make your site 'work'. Modern, compliant, standards-based browsers render the pages without errors.

[*]The 'newsletter' link on the 'content' page is a link back to the content page... it goes nowhere.

No it shows a modal window, with a sign up form. What browser are you using? Because it sounds like your javascript has crashed.

[*]Proofread!! There are a large number of typos on the site that need to be corrected, take a few minutes and read word by word all of the content to see what I mean. Examples: Gold Award description: ...and the award is generally reserved until we have believe that we have reviewed a good... Correction: omit the word 'have', Bronze award description: ...product is still strong in the areas that it matters most. Correction: change 'it matters' to 'matter'
Gamer's choice award description: ...product offers such an improvement to a users gaming experience Correction: 'user's' with apostrophe...
There are a lot of such instances and these 3 are from one page without a lot of text, many are grammatical and many are spelling errors but all need attention.

Every content-based website has spelling errors, instead of being a twat about it, send a polite message to someone that it needs to be corrected. No-one is perfect and when you have to spend the amount of time the team does just writing the stuff down, you very quickly go white-blind to spelling errors, paying someone to proof read this kind of thing isn't an option.
Do you want to do it for free? Go ahead, send through all the corrections to noreply at overclock3d.net and I'm sure someone will get back to you about it.


Sorry blue, but while some of these are valid, you're just coming across as trying to pick a bone here. You don't understand some of the things you're complaining about *at all*. Tom's priority is creating content and keeping the site fresh with that content, not fixing errors that have been there for years, and in most cases for very good reason.

 

[Tripp]

Wow it's all going off in here ain't it

 

[tinytomlogan]

Blue are you a member of other forums?

 

[SuB]

Wow it's all going off in here ain't it

Seems to be the theme of late

I was constructive and polite!! My post is only long because there was a lot to reply to

 

[Tripp]

Seems to be the theme of late

I was constructive and polite!!

Aye that you were mate, it was said not long ago by Tom that big changes were coming. Some people have no patients though it would seem

 

[SuB]

Aye that you were mate, it was said not long ago by Tom that big changes were coming. Some people have no patients though it would seem

Or patience* (Be careful there are spelling Nazi's about)

 

[Tripp]

Or patience* (Be careful there are spelling Nazi's about)

Hahahaha :') fair play I didn't even notice that, am in work on on the forum page on my phone, I don't do well with multitasking it would seem

 

[SuB]

Hahahaha :') fair play I didn't even notice that, am in work on on the forum page on my phone, I don't do well with multitasking it would seem

You should totally blame it on the auto correct. I do that all the time

 

[Excalabur50]

One of the things I have noticed is that Blue hasn't been here long but seems to want to rub people the wrong way, was going to comment on this sooner but let it lay but not anymore, so settle down Blue you are not doing yourself or anyone else any favors.