how important is good style sheet design to you?

Not much as long as it doesn't make my eyes bleed or the site difficult to navigate. SCC (as ringhunter mentioned) and Elektronik (RIP, as a tracker at least) are two examples of trackers that don't/didn't have a "wow, look at that" design, but which I found wonderful because they were easy on my eyes and all the tracker's items (browse, profile page and the like) were easily reachable.

1000possibleclaws said:
A stylesheet like 'proton' on whatcd
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Anorex for the win! :P
 
Of course, between two trackers with identical features but different skins, I'd pick the one with the skin I like the most, but at the end of the day, I'm on trackers to get my files and share back, not to drool at their banner/colors/etcetera..... so as long as the sites are, well, usable, I don't really care :p
 
i've talked about starting my own tracker before, but that was just an idea to gauge the interest of the niche i was pursuing. anyways, i would have to build this tracker from a template and from what i've seen, these templates require hours of customization in order for them to look half-decent. part of what i do for a living is elevating user experiences to increase user trials/sales, either via static or interactive designs, so this would be a fun way for me to contribute to this community

how does good style sheet design impact your user experience? call me picky, but i won't use a tracker at all if i don't like its design; imo, it ruins my user experience immediately because i'm forced to look at the (lack of) design before and after i see the torrents/forum

is good style sheet design a contributor to a successful tracker (i.e. if a better style sheet design was used, do you think a tracker would gain more traffic)?

do you use one tracker, over another, simply because of its style sheet design?

i'd love to get some deep, non-trolling conversations about this going, so feel free to add to the discussion, even if you're not familiar w/ design
 
If a site has fast load times, good search with relevant results, easy navigation without being crowded, good retention, good content and relatively fast speeds, then for all I care it could have a style sheet made with MS Paint.

The only site to ever fill all of those (well not the MS paint part) was SCT.
 
It's very important for me, as a good design can be used to gauge the mentality of the staff/their interest in professionalism and/or maturity. A tracker overladen with skull renders cannot be compared with a tracker designed with proper shade lines, an effective background, lax yet defined borders and a good color scheme with proper gradients; and the former provides a rather preemptive notion to the user, of how the staff would prefer to be perceived. At least when it comes to me, that is. Design isn't a way to use the tracker, but it is a way to know how to expect the community to behave. I can provide a few offensive examples, if needed.



You generally seem like a level-headed dude, so it stands to reason that you wouldn't think this post of mine is deterrent from what you think you should do, but rather my opinion on the matter. Starting a tracker up for the sake of doing so is pointless. Unless the tracker part is very significant to you, you're much better creating a BT discussion forum/help with this one here. Hosting a tracker opens you up to a world of problems that can't be addressed with simple design paint jobs.

th0r said:
how does good style sheet design impact your user experience?
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As a user experience, it definitely helps when the design is well thought out. Trackers like BG/PTN/CN/CE etc. are just too busy with buttons and "options" that frankly a majority of users that torrent for the actual content (which is the point of the protocol) couldn't care less about. A simple tracker, that is well thought out with where the buttons/options should be placed works best for everyone. Good examples of how it should be done are SCC/BCG, for example. "Less is more".

I don't think people would necessarily favor one tracker over another simply based on designs, as that is not the sole determining factor of the quality of a tracker; however, a hideous design would surely have some effect on the usability/activity/priority. I'd much rather use CN's search for a movie, as opposed to PTN's for example, simply because the former is usually more accessible, and more quickly customizable with filters than the latter.
 
Presto said:
Let's just say that a good design won't make me join a crappy site.
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Truer words were never spoken.
With the possible exception of amirji I don't know of anyone that logs into a site just to stare in awe at how pretty it is .
Great content can somewhat make up for less than perfect design but not vice versa.
 
If you're making a tracker, amke sure the search works for gods sake. a certain game stracker gives the most irrelevant results to everything, whereas its counterpart gives exactly what I'm using, so I'm more likely to use the latter. as for templates, if it's easy to navigate then I'll use it. At my connection speed, most sites are gonna max it out on a new torrent, and if it doesn't then it's not worth having as a site. so I go with whatever I find m,yself able to look at.
 
If it pisses me off, I code my own or modify an existing one (assuming it's gazelle). If it's not gazelle... it should be decent but really, content trumps all unless the only stylesheet available is some terribly garish thing.
 
I used to use Bitsoup a lot back in the day and it had one of the worst designs I've ever seen. Content trumps design any day of the week. Then again, a shitty tracker with a shitty design is just bad. That's why I won't consider signing up for most of the new trackers that are popping up all the time because their stylesheets just reek of amateurism.
 
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