Welcome to Polygon. It's a website (finally)

http://www.polygon.com/2012/10/24/3547938/welcome-to-polygon

by justjohn • 14 years ago

36 20 14 years ago

dylanrw2• 14 years ago

I like the trend of well designed, objective news sources. Methinks these guys have a future.

vitalique• 14 years ago

I'd love to like such a trend, I just don's see one. Can you name a few sites from this trend I seem to be missing? I've been waiting for Polygon, but sadly it is far from being well designed imo. Few things that jump at me instantly when I try to read Polygon: tiny serif font but giant line-height in article texts (I hate waste of screen real estate, and I'm not even using a laptop or a tablet), spacings and paddings between page elements so vast I feel lost in the woods, sticky logo/menu line at the top (come on, I can find +1 button myself), images way bigger than I'd like them to be without lightbox view, no proper labeling of check-boxes (tried to sign up / login) and some other questionable design choices. What bugs me most is fading text in the descriptions on the main page. Content wise (which is more important compared to design anyways), it may just be too soon to speak about quality/objectiveness. I like The Verge though, so all my great expectations about the Polygon's content stand until proved to be wrong. Congrats on the (re)launch.

dylanrw2• 14 years ago

I was referring to The Verge and Polygon, also Marco, df, etc. but they tend to be opinion rather than news.

I'm not sure why you have an aversion to those aesthetic decisions they've made, as most of them are technically correct and quite pleasing to my eye. They all contribute to conveying the game's innate experience and delivering an honest review without you having to actually play the game, and they do this well.

kmfrk• 14 years ago

They were off to a slightly bumpy start back in June: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=478786.

Gring3• 14 years ago

This site has the same issue 98% of all websites with a big overlay at the top have - every time you scroll using the page down key, the page jumps too far and you miss one or more lines of text. I hope this gets fixed quickly.

Interestingly enough, it's better on the iPad, where the top scrolls normally with the rest of the page.

This idea of having stuff fixed on the page goes back to the late 1990s, when frames were popular and tasteless big corp CEOs went "oh hey great, with frames we can ensure that certain parts of our branding are always in the face of the customer. Bring it on!".

A few years down the line, we grew up, refined our taste and trusted that if a visitor sees the logo in the top left and then scrolls down, he still remembers the branding. It's sad, really, that this lesson was lost again in the past year.

Geee• 14 years ago

In the age of infinite scrolling / non-pagination it's a huge pain to scroll back up for menu. Especially on mobile. Polygon obviously uses the fixed bar for improved user experience. It takes up precious screen space - but that's the tradeoff.

Gring3• 14 years ago

You do are aware that on iOS you can tap the top bar and scroll back to the top with 1 tap? And on non-mobile, there is a scroll-to-the-top key that does the same thing…?

hayksaakian• 14 years ago

The site was loading quite slowly on my nexus 7

nuttendorfer• 14 years ago

I have to say the layout is pretty unusual and I'm not sure I like it. Maybe I'll get used to it however.

syeren• 14 years ago

I find it pretty horrible for actually reading content on the site. When I try and read a review[1], I find the flow of my reading constantly broken by huge images and the copy jumping all around the page.

It's a pretty site, I just don't know if the design is right for the content in certain cases.

[1] http://www.polygon.com/game/medal-of-honor-warfighter/2686

jrajav• 14 years ago

Am I crazy for actually liking that page you linked? I much prefer a site to carefully craft an article much like a paper magazine would, with the presentation given a great deal of thought as well as the content. You get to see high-quality images, visuals, and typography, instead of a Markdown document thrown into a Wordpress template with the article squeezing into a 40% width justified column and taking a backseat to navigation columns, ads, related articles, "share this!", survey popups, and pagination to make sure you see it all 4 times.

Besides, if you really hate original layout, you can reduce both extremes to something palatable with Readability and friends. That page happens to look great with it, though it does get rid of the image gallery and rating: http://www.readability.com/read?url=http%3A//www.polygon.com...

Xion• 14 years ago

The website is absolute performance nightmare. It hanged my browser for 10+ seconds before I was able to do anything. Less Javascript, please.

SeanDav• 14 years ago

Was absolutely fine for me on Firefox.

duqee• 14 years ago

Website was fine loading for me in Chrome.

ilovekitty• 14 years ago

Do you have an RSS feed? I couldn't find it.

spindritf• 14 years ago

They do http://www.polygon.com/rss/index.xml it's advertised in the head, your browser should've caught it.

      <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Polygon" href="/rss/index.xml" />

tsigo• 14 years ago

Oof, look at this Rails controller code from the video in their blog post: http://cl.ly/image/2j1O2q152r0c

What a mess that code base must be.

charliesome• 14 years ago

Most sites have messy codebases, news at 11.

gabemart• 14 years ago

Look at their review scoring policy[1], I'm a little underwhelmed. A score of 5:

>indicates a bland, underwhelming game that's functional but little else. These games might still possess quirks or aspects that appeal to certain players.

So what's the purpose of scores below 5? The description for a score of 5 is the lowest possible baseline for a game I might want to play. It seems like a full half of the scoring space is essentially purposeless when viewed from the perspective of recommending games to people who might want to buy them.

[1]http://www.polygon.com/pages/about-reviews

Gring3• 14 years ago

They seem to consider a score of 7.5 or 8 "average", much like the rest of gaming publications. Sad, really.

Welcome to Polygon. It's a website (finally)

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