martes, 13 de septiembre de 2016

Possible changes coming to the site


Hey everyone, I'm thinking about doing some rather large changes to a part of the site and I need your input. This text here is only to have something before the break.
Now, let's get serious.

One of my most disliked parts about the site are the Weekly Software pages as those just can't be displayed in the way I wanted. At the time of making the site I just went with it as well, there was a lot to make so I just went with the fastest way, this is what I'm talking about by the way.
https://sites.google.com/site/gamedatalibrary/software-by-year/2016-weekly

The idea of these pages is to have all the weekly software data in one giant spreadsheet, you have the dates at the top (on an independent spreadsheet as it can't work otherwise) and below it what actually matters, you can see the system, the name of the week and how much it sold on all weeks of the year, so far so good right? Well, let's try moving to the left as I can only see week 15, let's say I want week 25.

Ok, so where are the names of the games, what am I seeing data of, what was the period of week 25? Sadly you can't see them, if you want to see the names of the games you got to go all the way back to the beggining and check and the table above has to be moved independently, it's not convenient now, is it?

Sadly this can't be fixed, both tables can't be merged into one, the first two columns can't be locked so they are visible at all times, this is as good as it can't possibily look and function better with this format.

While I do want to have a better showcase for this data, we lost some good functions if it were to be replaced, all the filtering and categorization options would be gone, as well as the search feature.

So we don't have a win, win solution. For the time being I'm thinking of two alternatives. Showcasing the data as some kind of slideshow, or showcasing it as text in a PDF file.

On both options the data would now look like this, instead of having one giant spreadsheet with the data of all weeks at once, each week would be represented with an indivitual table instead, this way we have a more cleaner look with everything visible, from the position of the game that week, it's system, it's name, it's publisher, release date what it sold that week and a new addition, it's total sales at the end of that week. This part sadly couldn't be in the current format as it would overcomplicate everything.

The difference between the slideshow and the PDF option in the new format is that on the slideshow you can easily choose which week you want to see in a couple of clicks while on the PDF one you'd have to look it manually, at the same time on the PDF option would be able to copy and paste the text of the table but on the slideshow you're unable to do that.

So I'm rather split here on which one to use due to the advantages each one has, at the same time I'm not even sure if to replace the current format as we loose a lot on that fron as well. I have thought of the possibility of having some sort of tab inside the page so you can just choose as your liking which kind of version you want to see and then we don't really loose anything, but I still haven't found a way to do that just yet.

So, here you enter the picture, what would you like to be done about this? What should I go with, what should change?

I really want input from people on this as I haven't really made my mind just yet, this change would be a big one with lots of work required so before I go deep into it I'd like the remarks of someone else.

Really looking forward to what everyone has to say on the matter, if anyone says anything of course.

Thanks for stopping by.

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