The trip to Salford went reasonably well, yesterday.

-=-=-

A little bit of a panic when the Patient Transport arrived far too late to get us there on time, but we got there in the end, and all was well and good.
The Doctor was pleasant, and chatted to both me and Mum, saying he was OK with the most recent scan, before having a mild fondle of my head's lumpy bits, and discussing future plans for another chat and perhaps a fresh scan in about 6 months time.

Once the important stuff was out of the way, we had a general chit-chat for a good 10 minutes or so.

With a myriad of laptops strewn around his office, technology and online presence were discussed, with a recent incident on his LinkedIn profile being a particularly curious topic.
Lesson of the day : Don't change anything on your LinkedIn profile, unless you REALLY mean it!!

The topic of programming naturally came up. He showed off one of the tools he'd written, and at some point, Mum chipped in with mention that I write games.
Uhoh, Show and tell time..

Honestly, I'm crap at doing this stuff.
"Oh, you make games." followed by me trying not to make things sound too awesome because people usually expect AAA quality, and I shove semi-not-even-8-bit games in their face!!
Me and self-promotion just don't work.

Anyhoo, after a lot of faffing about (the Hospital Wifi obviously not liking Doctors playing AGameAWeek games during office hours!) he eventually got to the site on his phone, and ..
Oh dear..

"Is this a game?" he asked, pointing to one of the first gamey-looking things he saw on the site.
.... "Um... No, that's just a picture of the day," I had to point out.
And there's hundreds of blog posts, and the poetry and the music...

The first game on the site (at the time of writing) was Arc Annihilation, and that was a fair amount of scrolling down the page.
Sure, there's the "Most recent games" thing up at the top of the page, but those don't look like "HEY, there's content up here!!" and our trained web-viewing eyes have told us to avoid everything up at the top of the page.

It took FAR too long to get to a game..
Then he clicked on the thing, and I had to show him where the game's link was, because being an odd little old-skool HTML5 logo, it looks stupidly outdated, and is a very "Geeky" kind of an icon that doesn't exactly scream "PLAY!"

.. Tapping that on his phone then brought him to a GotoJSE.. At which point I had to explain that I'd also written that language, before trying to show off how to use the thing to play it. Big green play button!!
Oh, and the touch controls don't auto-popup on the GotoJSE site, so I had to quit the game, show him the Touch Controls toggle button, then restart so he could work it on his phone.

Ugh...
That's not easy. It's a mess of buttons and obstacles, and it's just not user friendly.

Eventually he got there, but it was quite the task... and he's very much a techy kind of guy, who can code!!

It makes me realise just how difficult it is for other people to find ANYTHING on this site.
Seeing the site through fresh eyes, really makes me want to grab a big sledgehammer and redo from start.

I know I said I'd work on SX-5b, this year, but I think.... First.. I really need to fix that issue.

The layout of this site seems ok to me, because I'm staring at the thing all the bloomin' time, and I know where all the bits are.
The little coloured borders of each square on the front page are meaningful enough for me, but not to anyone else!

Newcomers are lost, and the whole thing is just an erratic mess... Even after everything I've tried to do to it over the past couple of years.

A rethink.
A restructure.
And hopefully I can then say to people "AGameAWeek!" and it won't be a giant chaotic sprawling mess.

If you've any suggestions, let me know what you think I could do, in the comments.
Hmmm...


"It's all a great big chaotic sprawling mess of grids and boxes and pictures and too much content. Surreal pastel watercolour." by #DallE