Members of There's virtual world use an internal website called 'There Central' to accomplish a variety of tasks: buying/selling items, creating/signing up for events, finding people, reading message boards, etc.
There Central Home Page
There Central began as a primarily functional, engineering-driven website. Consequently, any work done on it involved incorporating the key characteristics of the There brand: "easy", "fun", "friendly", "alive" and "inclusive".
This home page redesign also provided additional promotional opportunities, improved navigation to other areas of the site, and took advantage of a recent widening of the browser window.
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Clubs Home Pages
The ability to create a club is a key social element in There. Each club is given a home page which is meant to serve as a central meeting/information sharing place for club members.
Functionality is in place to personalize the club home pages but if it wasn't used, the pages looked bland and uninviting (not fun or friendly).
The pages were noticably improved by re-shuffling the content (moved some of the dynamically generated content into a more prominent location) and adding an attractive placeholder image.
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Click any image to see a full-size version.
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'Places' Landing Page
There were several issues to resolve with this redesign, including:
- Primary functionality on the page more related to people than places (not easy)
- Primary graphic element was a static placeholder (not fun or alive)
- Cumbersome process for finding houses (not easy or friendly)
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Click any image to see a full-size version.
These were addressed in the following ways:
- People related functionality moved to the 'People' landing page, replaced with direct links to popular destinations in the virtual world
- Static image was replaced with a series of dynamically rotating 'place promos', adding a live feel to the page without requiring more work from the content programming team
- Links to finding houses were made more prominent, and the process simplified by removing an extra step in the UI path
- Additional space opened up to promote additional events, products or services