It was clear that a new design eventually must come: The other pages including the forums already have been updated to the new design, so of course also the homepage eventually also have to be.
Today the most important thing above all even functionality and quality is, it must look modern and cool, which today means: Fisher-Price like foolproof to distinguish structure: very large, simple and sterile, lots of space wasted, useful information removed, toy gadgets and useless info bloated and added redundantly.
But comparing to what was presented app. 2 years(?) ago as the new design which they asked feedback for, this is a good compromise: It "only" needs 3 pages to present everything (the old one needed 1.3), while the first sketch needed >8 or even more, a real mousewheel killer, also known as bogroll design.
You don't question but just gotta do what everybody else does, no matter how useless or stupid that is. Which to me proves that many webpage designers know how to program a page but not how to design a user friendly page. Of course not. The designers works for their clients, not for the users of a page. Neither of them are using the page themselves. They only need to fulfill what they believe the users may like by looking at other pages designed the same way. The least page designers are capable to follow the most exemplary lead page design there is, looking at it themselves many times every day:
www.google.com - one (1) page following the principle "perfection is not reached when you cannot add anything anymore, but when there is nothing left you can remove."
Well at least it tries to come as close to the original one as possible, since what again they copied from the first sketch they presented: attracting newcomers is more important than to inform the established community. The latter ones have to scroll down, drop the too bloated self advertisment garbage to get to information.
Plus like the handbook after its last major design update the homepage now also does not work anymore correctly on 90° turned to portrait monitors, only on landscape, while even bogroll designs are predestinated for portrait...As I said: Looks are more important than functionality, and they know what's currently modern and looks cool, but have no idea of what an actual good design was.
*sigh* The days of Luigi Colani are over, who got his products cool looks as byproducts from well considered and tested functionality, not by just copying cool looks.
