For the past 2+ months I've been working on recoding the entire site to help increase the site's traffic and revenue and to also make the site faster, lightweight and both mobile friendly and user friendly. The site's traffic and revenue has taken some serious drops over the past year and especially in the past few months and it's to the point where I'm no longer making a full time income off of the site which means that I need to go all out to change that, otherwise I'll have to go find a job somewhere which would result into me investing far less time on the site. For more information regarding the site's traffic drop, go here: https://www.vizzed.com/boards/thread.php?id=89050



For the past 2 months I've been literally working on the site 60-70 hours a week with 50+ of those hours each week going into the new site design/layout. In other words, I've probably got around 400 hours into it and by the time I'm done, it'll probably be a total of 500+ hours. I've had to sacrifice my entire summer in order to try and stop the site's traffic and revenue from dropping any further which has resulted into me literally only going outside a total of 2 hours this entire summer (going to the store each week doesn't count since I'm in the car or store so not really enjoying nature that way). This also resulted into me having to put more focus on saving the site and less focus on taking care of other site stuff such as Private Messages, Notifications, etc. If I'm unable to get the site's traffic and revenue up by September 1st, then I'll be applying to various jobs. Hopefully I'm successful so that I can continue working on the site full time like I've been doing for the past 5+ years. My family and I are struggling pretty bad financially so I'm taking this pretty serious (btw, it's amazing how easy it is to lose weight when you can't afford to eat). I am very thankful though for those who have donated, especially the huge amount of donations I've received over the past 2 months, it really helps me pay bills and also helps me to continue paying Tom to work on the RGR Plugin updates that we need.



Anyways, enough about why I'm doing this, let me tell you all what I've done, what I plan to do and the benefits of it all!



New Site Layout/Design Mostly Finished = Time to Migrate Old Pages to New Code
The new site layout/design is mostly finished so now it's time to migrate the old pages of the site to the new code. For the next 3-6 weeks I'll be migrating each page of the site to the new code and I'll be doing them in order of popularity. Pages that generate the most traffic I'll try and tackle first and the lesser popular pages I'll most likely tackle later. The very last page I'll tackle is the page where you read posts since that'll be the most difficult to migrate.

Each page can take anywhere between 15 minutes to 1 week to migrate. Basically the more content or features a page has, the harder it will be to migrate. Here's a list of pages that I plan to migrate next (in no order):
-Game Pages
-Profiles
-Board Index
-Forum Pages

Pages Migrated So Far:
-Site Index
-Retro Game Room Index
-Video Game Room Index





New Site Code
Every page of the site uses 2 main files and I've literally recreated those 2 files from the ground up. Nearly 10,000 lines of code have been either altered, deleted or migrated to the new code and has all been incredibly optimized. In the next few paragraphs I'll explain the benefits of doing this.

Faster Site Performance
The render speeds of the new site is literally 2-4 times faster than it was before. The site is incredibly light weight now and the pages load so fast that sometimes it doesn't even appear to load a new page at all.

Faster Development Time
While recoding the site, I made it so much more organized and easier for me to work with. Also, having the entire site use the same layout and code will make developing new features literally 2+ times quicker. Before when I made a feature, I had to not only work with a lot of messy and sloppy code but I also had to create a new layout for every page since the previous site code didn't really have a reusable architecture. Working on and expanding current features will be so much quicker now as well.

Better Site Security
While recoding the site I found some a lot of potential exploits that I patched up. I also added some extra security to the site while recoding. I'm not done implementing my security ideas, I plan to implement a few other things over the next few weeks.





New Site Design and Layout
I've given the site a new lightweight design and easy to use layout. For the past few years I've received a lot of criticism of the design and layout of Vizzed and while that stuff really did bother me, I just didn't have the time redo it before. The site started out as an acmlm board 10+ years ago and has slowly migrated into custom code over the years so the site's layout and design never got a complete overhaul but instead I was always just modifying the current site code and design to suit my needs and to save time, I usually didn't put very much focus on the design aspect of things but instead put more of my focus on the functionality. In the next few paragraphs I'll explain what I've done with the site's design and how it's beneficial.

Lightweight
The pages of the site not only render faster but the HTML and graphics used is so much smaller than before. The size of the page HTML is far more organized, has less errors and is around half the size of the old pages. Scrolling the pages should be pretty smooth compared to before when scrolling some pages was choppy (and that was because the old pages had too much HTM and poor use of graphics and background images).

The site also uses less javascript, uses CSS more efficiently, no longer uses tables and other outdated HTML and the ads now load after the page loads. Before the page wouldn't be able to load until after the ad loaded which made pages appear clunky and when an ad failed to load, the rest of the page below that ad would also fail to load. Fixing these things helps make browsing the site appear very seamless.

Mobile Friendly
The old site wasn't mobile friendly at all and that's mainly because mobile devices are still a new trend so when I made and added pages in the past, I didn't think about mobile devices since barely anyone used them while using the site. The new site was designed with mobile devices in mind and adapts to your device whether it be a tablet or a cell phone. The site detects whether you're using a mobile device and then displays the site based on that. I'll eventually make it possible for mobile uses to browse the desktop version of the site.

I'm still not done working on the mobile friendliness of the new site but I've made it a high priority since 1/3 of the site's traffic comes from mobile devices and because so many users have requested it. Below are some examples of what the site looks like on mobile devices.

Desktop
https://www.vizzed.com/

Tablet
https://www.vizzed.com/index.php?mobileDevice=Tablet

Cell Phone
https://www.vizzed.com/index.php?mobileDevice=Phone

Browser Friendly
It was hard but I got the site to work and look fine in all browsers, including Internet Explorer. Now I haven't tested it in all browsers but I tested it in the ones I have and I can confirm that it looks and functions great in all of the most popular browsers. This wasn't the case previously.

Resolution Friendly
The site adjusts to the width of your monitor. If you have a narrow screen, the site will display less content. If you have a wide monitor, the site will display additional content, specifically the user hud (more about that below). If you have a wide monitor, try resizing your browser vertically and/or horizontally to see what I mean.

SEO Friendly
I've put a lot of focus on the meta tags of the site and also the content that appears on the pages and the order in which they appear. The titles of the pages should not only be more appealing for those searching on search engines like Google but I'm hoping that it also increases the search engine rank of the site's pages greatly as well.

Most of the new pages will have a page introduction. The title in that introduction area will usually reflect the page's meta title and the content will usually reflect the page's metal description.

Keywords are important and the closer to the left of a title they are, the more powerful they are. I've changed the way the page titles appear on the new site, especially the VGR and RGR pages. You can see examples of this below:
https://www.vizzed.com/playonlinegames/index.php?system=snes
https://www.vizzed.com/playonlinegames/index.php?system=gba&search=pokemon

Things I still plan to do which will greatly help my the Google rank of Vizzed include:
-Creating a Robots.txt file which tells bots how to navigate the site
-Creating a site map
-Altering the URLs of some pages to include more keywords

User Friendly
I've really tried to design the new layout with the end user in mind and assuming that everyone who uses the site is using it for the first time. Giving the site a cleaner and less cluttered look is less likely to overwhelm a new user and putting more focus on the things that are more important will help keep a new users interest.

Every page has a consistent look and once a user learns how to use it, every page of the site will make sense and be easy to use.

Navigation Column
The floating Navigation column will show all of the main links of the site and also all of the links of the section of the site that you're in. It's almost like a site map squeezed into a small little area. This will really help the flow of the site's navigation and help users know what the site has to offer and to also help make sure they don't get lost. It also stays in place once you start scrolling which will make sure you always have a reference point of where you're at on the site.

Information Column
This column provides information depending on what page you're on and what you hover your mouse over. Each section of the site will display different information in that area. Hovering over various things on the site will display temporary information which will help new users to understand what things do or mean. Here's an example of different things you can hover over:
-Usernames
-Various Words
-Various Editing Tools
-User Hud Editing Tools

The site will turn various phrases and terms into clickable links which take a user to a page with information regarding that feature. Highlighting these will also give you quick information in the Information column. You can see an example of this in action here:
https://www.vizzed.com/test.php
(you'll also notice the page has a custom look; refer to 'Page, Forum and Profile Editing' below)

This currently applies to all pages that have the new code and I plan to make it replace additional words in the future. We get a lot of users asking how to earn and spend Viz and a lot of users asking what the Contribution Points are, this will hopefully answer a lot of those questions and also help promote the 2 features.

Page Intros
Most of the pages will now have a brief introduction toward the top of each page. This introduction area will show you the title of the page, a brief description of what the page has to offer and links to all of the pages relevant to the current page. The links are basically a repeat of the links you'd find in the Navigation column but that's necessary since these links stick out more and appear to everyone (the Navigation column doesn't appear on mobile devices).

Dynamic Content
A lot of the content on a lot of the pages is dynamically taken from the database. What most of you don't see is an 'Edit Page' and 'Add Content' panel that makes it simple to add and alter content on any page of the site. These tools will make it easy in the future for staff to alter various things on various pages, forum owners to alter their own forum and users to completely alter their own profile.

Ad Placement
For the next few weeks I'll be playing around with ad placement in order to find what out what placement of ads pays the most. I'm going to try and limit the pages of the RGR and VGR to 2-3 ads per a page for users (and 4-5 for guests) and all other pages of the site to 1-2 ads per a page for users (3-4 for guests). Like I said earlier, the ads no longer slow down a page's load time and should no longer cause pages to not load.

I'm currently using 2 ad networks but 1 of them just doesn't pay very well at all so I'll also be looking into and trying out different ad networks over the next few weeks as well. In order for me to justify working on the site full time, I need to make a full time income. I also need to make enough to afford the $2000+ site fees and servers and also to fund other things like competitions and RGR Plugin updates.





User Hud
Personally, this is something I'm very excited about. Anyone who has a wide enough monitor will see additional content that appears to the sides of the page. If your monitor is at least 1366 pixels wide, you'll get a User Hud to the right. If your monitor is at least 1662 pixels wide, you'll get a User Hud to the left. Anyone with a monitor smaller then these will not get access to the User Hud but I'll try and come up with a solution to this later (but for now you can shrink your browsers display to make it show in order to see what it's about which can be done by press CTRL and - in Firefox).

Purpose of the User Hud
The User Hud is a collection of content which a user has pinned. The User Hud idea started out as a way to help utilize all of the extra space to the sides of the page but then evolved into an idea which I think is pretty innovative. The User Hud displays on every page and gives the user access to content that they use most. It's an optional feature which can be completely customized by each individual user and only you can see your own User Hud.

Default Content
Every user has a default set of 4 content pins which include 'Your Links and History' (under construction), 'Your Online Friends', Trending on Site' (under construction) and 'Your Friend Actions'. You can alter, add to or remove from the default pins.

Altering the User Hud
You can alter your User Hud by changing the order of the pins and by removing them. If you dislike the User Hud feature, press the red X on all of your content pins and it'll be completely gone. I eventually plan to make it so that you can customize each pin a little further by changing the individual look of each and by changing how many results display in each content pin (so for example, if you want the 'Your Friend Actions' to show more than the last 10 actions of your friends, that will be possible eventually).

Adding Content to the User Hud
Any piece of content on the site which has a 'Pin' link at the top right of it can be pinned to your User Hud. When content is pinned to your User Hud, it'll usually be a more condensed version of that content so that it can fit properly in your User Hud.

I eventually plan to make a page dedicated to all sorts of things for users to pin to their User Hud. Future pinable content may include:
-A condensed Cometchat chat bar (for those who have access to it)
-Quick view of all the latest posts (a simplified version of 'new posts')
-List of all the site's forums (a simplified version of the board index forum list)
-Calendar (future feature)





Page, Forum and Profile Editing
Any page that you're considered an "admin" of will give you access to tons of ways to alter the page. Things you can alter on a page include adding content to the page, editing content, changing the order of the page's content, altering the pages title and pretty much changing every design aspect of the page. I'll go over who will have access to editing what.

To give you an example of how you can alter a page's look completely very effortlessly, I gave the following page a look based on the yearly Vizzed Christmas theme which only took me around 5 minutes to do:
https://www.vizzed.com/test.php

Here's a look at the panel which lets you edit various things (it simply pops up on any page)

(click for larger view)

Profile Editing
This isn't possible yet but as soon as I migrate your profiles over to the new site code, you'll be able to completely customize your profiles. Due to security reasons, I'll be preventing users from being able to change the look of their profiles using the method that they currently use. To make up for it, users will have an easy to use interface which will allow them to change the look of their profile. Things they'll be able to change include Fav Icon, Banner, Page Background, Font of the page or any specific area of the page, background of various content areas, etc.

You'll also be able to completely alter the actual content that displays on your profile. You'll be able to alter the order of the content boxes, remove any that you don't want and add just about any dynamic content to your page. So for example, if you like the 'Your Online Friends' content box (which also displays in the User Hud) then you can add it to your profile. When dynamic content gets added to profiles which is based on a user, that content will be based on the user of the profile that the content is on. So for example, if I added the 'Your Online Friends' content box to my profile, users would see a list of my online friends in that content box on my profile.

Just like with the User Hud, any box of content on the site which is dynamic can be placed into your profile and you can find out whether a piece of content is dynamic if it has the 'Pin' link at the top right (of course you'll go about adding it to your profile differently). I plan to create more content in the future that can be added to your profile and you'll also be able to simply add empty boxes to your profile that you can completely alter.

Basically profiles will be like your own personal homepage that you can completely customize. I'm hoping to have profiles migrated to the new code within 2 weeks so that you can all experience what I have envisioned. All of the editing will be easy to use and will be done from your profile's page and from that same page you'll be able to alter your various settings so the 'Edit Settings' page will no longer be necessary since all of that stuff will be easily adjustable from your profile.

Forum Editing
As long as you're a mod of a forum, you'll have access to altering that forum. You'll be able to completely alter the look of the inside of your forums. You'll be able to alter just about everything including the banner, backgrounds, etc. When altering a forum that you rent, you'll automatically be deducted the Viz for various edits.

Forum owners will also be able to change the title and description of their forum on their own and will also be able to alter how it displays on the board index page without having to rely on anyone else.

Mods and forum owners will also be able to change the mods of any forum they have power over.

These updates will hopefully take place within a month. This will save me a ton of time since I will no longer have to take care of time consuming things which I currently have to do through the database. It'll also give forum owners far more control over their forums.

Page Editing
Any page you have powers over you can alter in just about any way. Some pages will have additional things that can be altered. Only I have access to editing the current pages at the moment but as I slowly migrate pages to the new code, staff members will gain access to editing various things.

I may also eventually make it so that users can have their own site hosted on vizzed which will give them access to all of the easy to use editing features to create a site that uses the database and layout of vizzed.





Plan for the Next 2 Weeks
I'm most likely going to reduce the amount of time I work on the site to around 20-30 hours a week for the next 2 weeks in order enjoy a few days of summer with my wife and kids and to also see if I can find other ways to bring in an income without having to get a full time job somewhere. Some of my ideas include releasing 1 or 2 mobile apps and creating 1 or 2 YouTube videos. I'll also be placing more stuff on ebay to sell. I may also look into seeing if I can find freelance work.





Feedback Time
Hopefully I covered everything regarding everything new but this is already a huge thread and there's 100s of hours worth of things that I did so I more than likely forgot to mention a few things. I'll be creating separate thread for each page I migrate to the new code and probably once or twice a week I'll be making an announcement that briefly goes over every page that was migrated that week so that I can receive feedback. I'll also be making a separate thread in the near future regarding the migration of the RGR and VGR index pages to the new code (which took place recently).

Anyways, if anyone has any questions, feedback or ideas regarding everything that is new with the site, please let me know in this thread. I'm definitely open to changing anything that needs to be changed if enough users support the change.

I know it doesn't matter right now, but how will this affect people's profiles? I know some people have a lot of their profiles edited by HTML, so will this mess up anything? I'm not very experienced in coding to know. >w<

I love a lot of these, especially the profile and forum changes. No more waiting months for forum changes!

Just going to mention, scroll boxes and mobile devices don't get along, but the tablet and phone versions are looking nice! Very nice that it stays true to the desktop version.

Gingercream1 : Any alterations users have made to their current profiles will not be migrated to the new profiles. So if someone changed the look of their profile using their bio, that will not be reflected on the new profiles. However, it shouldn't be too hard for users to alter the re-alter the look of their new profile once I've migrated profiles over to the new code. It shouldn't take more than 15 minutes to completely match a profiles look to the old look for users who currently have a unique look on their profiles.

All other content will be migrated over just fine which includes profile comments, bio information, etc.


zanderlex : Exactly!


bigger0gamer : I'll look into removing anything that requires scrolling on the mobile versions of the site.

With that many changes, I think even active users will have the feeling of being in a completely different site

I haven't used Vizzed on my cell phone that much, but as far as I can tell, I can post and chat with almost no trouble. Of course, it is to expect I won't have the same features as in a PC or laptop, if the new update helps this in some way it will be good news for sure.

I like the way in which profiles will be much easier to customize. I was about to change my bio to update it a little bit as well, but I'll wait until I get the new changes so I can make everything in a single go.

I'm also interested in the calendar feature. If it is similar in any way to Facebook's calendar system, like giving you a notification everytime it's one of your friend's birthday, I'll welcome it with my arms open.

Since new users will surely be asking this, will you implement the username change feature or are you still considering that idea?

And since I asked a question, do you think it could be possible to add a button to let you stop/activate your layout while posting, instead of going through the Edit Profile thingy? I'm sure I'm not the only one who forgets about activating it again after stopping it for a long post. Just an opinion from probably the clumsiest staff member

Davideo7 : I'm pretty excited the site is getting a new look. After a while, it really started to look the same. I'm really looking forward to the site getting a makeover, and it helps make it more friendly for mobile and browsers too!

EX Palen : The calendar feature would be similar to that.

Users will have the option to change their username from their profile and it'll cost them 1000 Viz x their user level. I forgot to mention that admins will be able to alter anything on a user's profile that a user would be able to alter.

The layout activation thing is something I'll consider down the road.

Davideo7 : Whoa, that's a lot of stuff.I couldn't even read it all at one time.I admire your dedication sir.




I was thinking, what if some of the site users posted videos like lets plays or reviews of the games in the RGR room.That way they could promote the site as well.I was thinking of doing that once my microphone comes in from Amazon, but, if you could set up a way to encourage people to do that, I think it could really help out the site.

Spidey243 : Users already do that actually with the Vizzed YouTube Channel. Every little bit helps.

I wanna play with the stuff.  I think it's spunky and fun.  Gotta get you some cash.  Haven't done it, yet, but I will. 

You are rock and roll.  Well done.

I really like all the ideas you have for a newer version of Vizzed I think with this huge upgrade, it will make things a whole lot easier for other users.

For the mobile stuff, I got to say, everything you have planned is great, but trying to get the whole site on a mobile version can be quite tough, but with more tinkering with the mobile coding, you'll release the full mobile version in no time. For me, I have been using a mobile device for the past few weeks because my computer is broken, but with this feature, I can be able to post things and do staff-related stuff with no issue.

Keep up the work David, looking good right now.

I like all these, but this one is of the most import to me...

-----

"Forum Editing
As long as you're a mod of a forum, you'll have access to altering that forum. You'll be able to completely alter the look of the inside of your forums. You'll be able to alter just about everything including the banner, backgrounds, etc. When altering a forum that you rent, you'll automatically be deducted the Viz for various edits.

Forum owners will also be able to change the title and description of their forum on their own and will also be able to alter how it displays on the board index page without having to rely on anyone else.

Mods and forum owners will also be able to change the mods of any forum they have power over.

These updates will hopefully take place within a month. This will save me a ton of time since I will no longer have to take care of time consuming things which I currently have to do through the database. It'll also give forum owners far more control over their forums."

-----

Will "Forum Owner" be a rank different from "mod" with regards to rented forums? For example, I'm the "Forum Owner" for Innocent Town, and pacman1755 and mlb789 are "mods".

The way it has been worded, I am concerned about mods being able to remove the forum owner whenever they decide to (in the old Innocent Town, silverthundr had me removed from the forum, despite being the de facto owner of the forum, and him only being a mod).

I want to avoid any future possibilities of that, because it can only lead to drama, if not properly pre-empted.

I would also recommend only allowing "Forum Owners" access to those more administrative tools, in general. Not that "mods" couldn't handle things like changing a forum color or look, or any of that, but it just seems odd to give mods that much power over a forum, when they are more like employees of a forum, than a manager.

You wouldn't let a new employee at McDonalds hire new employees would you? And you wouldn't let either new employee change how the restaurant looks.

In general, what I'm asking is that these new things you plan down the line be exclusive to just "forum owners", and not to all mods of a forum. Because otherwise, various forums might start to have issues, knowing the maturity level of people on site.

Just wondering, I've noticed the "New Posts" button has is not in this new layout, will that page still be accessible/have a button somewhere? That page was my friend.

MeatAndPotatoes : Yeap I'm excited to getting these new features available to everyone.

legacyme3 : For rented forums, only the forum owner will be able to edit the mods and look of the forum. I completely agree with what you mentioned.

bigger0gamer : I plan to come up with a solution to that. Most likely that link will appear in that spot when you're on a forum page.

legacyme3 : There might be a tag related to the forum itself that allows only 1 person to edit the forum instead of creating a new power level for that.

Although I'm hoping that that restriction is only at local mod and lower so that global+ are still able to assist people if they need it

Just a guess on the way it's being done though.

Thanks for your continued dedication to Vizzed. So far I'm really digging the "trending" and "latest user actions" sidebars. It's a nice way to keep track of what's happening site-wide without having to look at every sub-forum.

CthulWho : Exactly. The User Hud will save a lot of users time by giving them all of the information they'd like to see often on every page.

geeogree : When it comes to regular forums, I can make it so that only globals and up will be able to change moderators.

Looks good from my point of view, took me a bit to move around the site but it feels alot more fluid then before. Great job. 
Wish I knew about site design so i'd be able to help out in some way. 

Davideo7 : Will the prices for forum changes be the same as before? And will there be the same things to change that are listed in the rent a forum thread or could there be more things to change?