Literotica needs a new front page with color, better graphics, and animation.

[SusanJillParker]

I've been writing stories on Literotica for 8 years and have been reading stories here even longer. It's time Literotica updated their front page.

"What do you all think? Don't you think it's time they updated their front page ala Google?"

Presently Literotica's front page has a white page with black and blue lettering. I feel as if I'm looking at a flag of Finland.

"Boring. I'm gagging."

Then, their logo of a woman in a bathing suit, what looks like she's a wannabe stripper holding onto an imaginary pole, just doesn't do it for me. I want to see the real thing, not just a black and white stick figure image or a faceless side view of a woman.

Laurel, let's have a new logo. After 16 years of the same old thing, it's time. We need to get you out of Windows XP and move you up to Windows 10. We need color. We need better graphics. We need animation. We look to you to inspire our imagination. When we see Literotica's front page we want shock and awe.

"Wow! Look at that front page. It's beautiful. I'm shocked. I'm in awe."

Get rid of the bathing suit on your logo of that woman. We want to see her naked. Give her blonde hair, big blue eyes, a prettier face, and bigger tits. Actually, have her look more like me (lol). We want to see her tits, her ass, and her pussy.

"I'd be happy to model for Manu...in the nude."

Have Manu give her a real pole, a full pole, a stripper's pole. Add a second woman on the other side of the pole. In the way that Google has all of that animation, we want to see some sexual action between the two women, a man and a woman, and/or two men.

As a temptation for anyone to go beyond Literotica's front page, we need more sexual teasing and erotic enticing.

Seriously, you need to get with the times Honey and update your graphics. You have a pool of talented designers and graphic artists who'd love to bring Literotica to the 21st century. Not to mention you have tens of thousands of erotica writers who'd loved to go nuts with your front page. I'm sure there are more web designers who read Literotica than there are accountants who read the Wall Street Journal.

C'mon people. This your chance to have your say. How would you improve the front page of Literotica? What would you do with the logo? Tell Laurel how color, graphics, and animation would make her front page so much better.

The way your front page is now, sorry to tell you this, but someone has to, it's a book by which your cover is judged.

"There, there. I'm sorry to be so brutally honest. I'm sorry to hurt your feelings. Please stop crying. Would it help if you gave me another Green E? I'm only trying to help. You didn't have to kick me."

Yet, if you will, imagine all of the money that could be made by updating the front page with color, graphics, and animation. I imagine tee shirts, hats, umbrellas, shopping bags, sweatshirts, jackets, sweatpants, key chains, and coffee mugs all with Literotica's new logo. In the way that Ralph Lauren has that stupid Polo pony, Laurel would have her colorful stripper graphic. I can just see it now.

"Wow!"

You're missing a big financial opportunity Laurel. This is your chance to cash in and move to Monte Carlo to live out your retirement with Vincenzo and the twins Vito and Mario, your future Italian lovers.

So...what do you say?

C'mon everyone show Laurel your support. Tell Laurel that you're just as unimpressed and bored with Literotica's front page as I am.

The way the front page now looks, it reminds me of Disney's first Mickey Mouse cartoon. Seriously, doesn't it?

Look. Even Manu is nodding his head up and down while holding his hands together with the hope of creating a new Literotica front page.

"Please?"

 

[lovecraft68]

You know the front page is lame when even the GB had a thread about how it should be improved.

Maybe its "coming soon"

 

[Zeb_Carter]

A while back there was a thread in the AH about this also. Several designs were submitted. A vote was taken and the old/current page won hands down.

Everyone felt it wasn't Literotic without the sketch of the young lady and the nice looking yet archaic look. It was after all, Literotic's signature.

Now I'm not going to say that it will never happen, but...why change something that works? That's the number one mistake companies across the interweb make, changing something that works to something new and fresh that no longer works.

 

[Carnevil9]

Maybe the lame graphics are a subtle comment that the written word is what rules here.

 

[Nathan_Brazil]

No. Just no.

 

[sr71plt]

I think there are a whole lot of nonfunctioning and/or badly functioning aspects of this Web site that need attention before the home page does (although there are some aspects of the home page that need attention too--when's the last time anyone could ask Fern a question? How long has the favoritist list been identified on the home page as a sneak preview and a "coming soon" feature?)

 

[evolvingslowly]

Ehhhh

While I might agree as a millennial that this website does have a rather antiquated feel that makes me think of the simpler times of "AskJeeves" and AIM, I don't actually think it's a bad thing. For me, the website could maybe be ungraded with more integrative search features but this is a free website that we all get to enjoy as a community. Also, I really really don't want a realistic naked woman. I'd far prefer keeping the somewhat classy drawing but then again as a gay man women being naked really doesn't do anything for me.

 

[sr71plt]

Also, I really really don't want a realistic naked woman.

Oh, I don't know. The offered naked shot of Susan/Freddie would be quite amusing--for about twenty-five seconds.

 

[TamLin01]

I agree that the frontpage is dated, but I'm of an "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude. Websites are forever "updating" their design, and usually the changes are both ugly and needless. If I've frequented a website for years, it stands to reason that I like the way that site looks.

I'm sure there are marketing-based reasons for a change, but frankly that sounds like all the more reason not to do a thing.

 

[ishtat]

I agree that the frontpage is dated, but I'm of an "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude. Websites are forever "updating" their design, and usually the changes are both ugly and needless.

But it is broke. Behind that initial image Lit is clunking along pretty much unchanged in its fundamental workings.

The OP is wrong however, she is only suggesting the illusion of change not the real thing. The site could be greatly improved in its performance and user flexibility even without changing its appearance. It would be more useful perhaps to canvas the entire membeship on how they think the site could be improved with change of real substance, rather than consider the superficial tinkering proposed by the OP.

 

[JKendallDane]

Courtesy of The Wayback Machine, from October 8, 1999: Literotica front landing page For real fun, click on anything under the Site Index and flashback 15+ years on those specific items. Even the chat forum topics from early 2000 can be accessed. (I'm surprised there isn't a Pilot thread bitching about some insignificant thing that didn't work back then )

Yeah, so it does look familiar. Real familiar. So what? The site...or at least what's most important anyway...works which is all that truly matters.

Those of us that are authors, can submit our stories and usually see them live within 48 hours. Within minutes of that happening, we can get feedback of all sorts and after 24 hours see various rankings post.

Readers can come here and either go to straight to their favorite category hub or use the well-functioning search engine to find both new stories or look for an old favorite. If they use the favoriting options, those authors and/or stories are just one click away. If they want to chat, the forums are just a different finger motion away. Another click and they have as many as 700 plus of the highest scoring stories that are in the HOF for each category.

Yeah, Fern has been MIA for years and some things are a bit wonky or just plain broken. But when you consider this is a sixteen-year-old website, with a lot of sixteen-year-old code running it, and have it still operating as expected 99% of the time, says it aint too shabby.

If you want flashing neon, dancing bears, new bells and whistles every other day, bucketfuls of nifty pop-ups, a constant barrage of ads to divert you somewhere else, and having to learn the "new 'improved' system of the month" then go wade through eBay. They have 1,000 people on staff that do nothing but write new code and invent new useless shit to justify their paychecks. All that kind of glam and glitter is what bogs a site down and creates conflicting coding nightmares that never get fixed properly. I'll stay happy with Laurel and Manu plodding along with their "outdated" front page and skeleton staff that keeps the site chugging away and basically uncluttered.

Too many times, "New & Improved" is neither.

.

 

[lovecraft68]

There is an argument for if its not broke don't fix it. There is also a case to be made for websites that are constantly changing appearance.

But after this many years a change is not going to hurt.

But remember new people find this site every day and many of them are younger. The average person on their early to mid twenties has grown up equating tech with quality. This site is past being a dinosaur to them might be enough of an eye roller for them not to bother.

On another thread some time ago someone mentioned a fairly new site (I want to say wattpad?) that has erotic stories that has a very slick appearance and is gaining popularity and whose authors and readership seem to have a much younger demographic than here.

If we were to look at the average age of the posters in this thread, I bet its easily 40+ maybe older. We're not a representation of what 'kids these days' are looking for.

I would not go with an outright nude that screams porn, lit bills itself as 'erotica'. I would go with something racy, but sexy, not pornographic, a woman is some seductive lingerie with a cherry in her mouth or something erotic.

As for SJP"s offer to post a nude pic, no good can come of that. There are serious revenge porn laws in effect and we all know it wouldn't be them they would be posting a pic of.

 

[Manu]

I don't claim to have any insider knowledge, but I heard that there's going to be a big Flash movie intro in the next version of the site.

Thanks for all of the comments. I'm not sure all of them are serious, but I'll add what little I can to the conversation.

Even though you don't always see changes at Lit, the entire Literotica.com website has been re-done several times in the last 15+ years. The site grows (sees more daily visitors) every month, which means that we have to be continually adding hardware and updating the software that runs the site. The system we have in place now is very different from the one we had even a couple of years ago. The newest Lit backend allows us to much more easily add servers and other hardware to the cluster without causing problems for visitors (hopefully).

As far as the long-promised re-design, we have been working on that for over a year now and we've made a lot of progress. The first part of the site that will be changed is the User Control Panel. We have an almost fully functional version of the new Control Panel that we've been testing for several weeks. There are still some bugs to work out, but we're confident that we'll be ready for testing with real users (that means you) before too long.

We also have an updated design for the public part of the site. That part of the site (including the front page) is not as far along because we need to do the public testing on the Control Panel before we can be sure of the best way forward on the public pages.

There are a lot competing technologies out there for web development these days (I can't tell you how many weeks and months we've spent considering different Java-Script frameworks and libraries). Lit is a huge project, so things that work for smaller websites won't always work here.

As far as the new design itself, our biggest focus has been on improving the experience for mobile users - both authors and readers. In the last few years, we've seen a large percentage of Lit users move to reading/writing on their phones and tablets. Lit has had mobile-friendly versions of the site for 10+ years (we even had a WAP site at one time), but our goal is to make the entire Literotica.com site - all features and pages - work well on both desktop and mobile devices.

Beyond the mobile-friendly stuff, we will be rolling out features that we've been working on for way too long. There will be a lot of small improvements (like the ability to sort/filter stories on hubs by more criteria) and some very big ones. Number one on our list is allowing readers to Follow an author. It's similar to the existing Favorite Authors feature, but it changes the dynamic from "I like this author" to "I want to get news and new submissions from this author in my personal inbox".

A lot of our effort has been put into changes that we hope will empower Lit authors to attract more readers who are interested in their specific work - and then to help authors build a stronger relationship with those readers once they find them.

So, while design for design's sake hasn't been our focus, the Lit design will be updated significantly as we add major new features and move toward a universally mobile-friendly experience.

 

[loquere]

I don't claim to have any insider knowledge, but I heard that there's going to be a big Flash movie intro in the next version of the site.

Thanks for all of the comments. I'm not sure all of them are serious, but I'll add what little I can to the conversation.

Even though you don't always see changes at Lit, the entire Literotica.com website has been re-done several times in the last 15+ years. The site grows (sees more daily visitors) every month, which means that we have to be continually adding hardware and updating the software that runs the site. The system we have in place now is very different from the one we had even a couple of years ago. The newest Lit backend allows us to much more easily add servers and other hardware to the cluster without causing problems for visitors (hopefully).

As far as the long-promised re-design, we have been working on that for over a year now and we've made a lot of progress. The first part of the site that will be changed is the User Control Panel. We have an almost fully functional version of the new Control Panel that we've been testing for several weeks. There are still some bugs to work out, but we're confident that we'll be ready for testing with real users (that means you) before too long.

We also have an updated design for the public part of the site. That part of the site (including the front page) is not as far along because we need to do the public testing on the Control Panel before we can be sure of the best way forward on the public pages.

There are a lot competing technologies out there for web development these days (I can't tell you how many weeks and months we've spent considering different Java-Script frameworks and libraries). Lit is a huge project, so things that work for smaller websites won't always work here.

As far as the new design itself, our biggest focus has been on improving the experience for mobile users - both authors and readers. In the last few years, we've seen a large percentage of Lit users move to reading/writing on their phones and tablets. Lit has had mobile-friendly versions of the site for 10+ years (we even had a WAP site at one time), but our goal is to make the entire Literotica.com site - all features and pages - work well on both desktop and mobile devices.

Beyond the mobile-friendly stuff, we will be rolling out features that we've been working on for way too long. There will be a lot of small improvements (like the ability to sort/filter stories on hubs by more criteria) and some very big ones. Number one on our list is allowing readers to Follow an author. It's similar to the existing Favorite Authors feature, but it changes the dynamic from "I like this author" to "I want to get news and new submissions from this author in my personal inbox".

A lot of our effort has been put into changes that we hope will empower Lit authors to attract more readers who are interested in their specific work - and then to help authors build a stronger relationship with those readers once they find them.

So, while design for design's sake hasn't been our focus, the Lit design will be updated significantly as we add major new features and move toward a universally mobile-friendly experience.

This is positive progressive news, thank you sir.

 

[lovecraft68]

I don't claim to have any insider knowledge, but I heard that there's going to be a big Flash movie intro in the next version of the site.

Can you cite your site source?

 

[SusanJillParker]

Thank you, Manu.

"I love you!"

I'd like to take this opportunity to climb on my soapbox, being that I was the one who started this thread.

"You're welcome."

Thank you Laurel and Manu for allowing writers a place to post our stories.

Thank you both. Thank you. A thousand times thank you.

Only, um, do you think that I can get a Literotica sweatshirt in pink, a size extra large because of my big boobs (lol)? Oh, and a key chain with the lady logo.

PM me for my address.

Thank you so very much.

Susan

 

[loquere]

Deleted

 

[49greg]

I like it the way it is. Nothing wrong with it.

 

[RejectReality]

To me, the problem with it is that it's a wall-o-text.

The only purpose the front page serves is to greet people visiting the site for the first time. I doubt most people see it very often, or for very long.

You don't want to go overboard with updating it to all kinds of flashy stuff, because that's not going to reflect the content beyond, which is words on a page. You need to catch people's interest without creating an unrealistic expectation.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

I vote to keep it the way it is...no need to change it.

Lit is about words as RR says, why display anything else to the first time user?

They came to read, let them read. The front page is very informative...would flash content be anymore informative? I don't think so. Personally I have flash turned off...a lot of malware gets in through flash. Same with **********.

I guess J a v a s c r i p t is an offensive word????

 

[TxRad]

To me, the problem with it is that it's a wall-o-text.

The only purpose the front page serves is to greet people visiting the site for the first time. I doubt most people see it very often, or for very long.

You don't want to go overboard with updating it to all kinds of flashy stuff, because that's not going to reflect the content beyond, which is words on a page. You need to catch people's interest without creating an unrealistic expectation.

Breaking the wall-o-words up a little would help a lot of people reading it just like in the stories posted here.

 

[GoldenCojones]

A lot of our effort has been put into changes that we hope will empower Lit authors to attract more readers who are interested in their specific work - and then to help authors build a stronger relationship with those readers once they find them.

Oh Shit! I write in LW. Any closer relationship with my readers and someone (me) is going to get hurt!

 

[TxRad]

Oh Shit! I write in LW. Any closer relationship with my readers and someone (me) is going to get hurt!

I still rent out shark proof suits for that category.

I'm thinking about adding bulletproof vests to the line.

 

[lovecraft68]

I still rent out shark proof suits for that category.

I'm thinking about adding bulletproof vests to the line.

The only defense one needs against an LW troll is to look at them and say "You have something to say"

They puff themselves up, realize that its a person in front of them and not a keyboard then mumble "Uh..no" and walk away.

 

[HeyAll]

As far as the new design itself, our biggest focus has been on improving the experience for mobile users - both authors and readers. In the last few years, we've seen a large percentage of Lit users move to reading/writing on their phones and tablets. Lit has had mobile-friendly versions of the site for 10+ years (we even had a WAP site at one time), but our goal is to make the entire Literotica.com site - all features and pages - work well on both desktop and mobile devices.

Beyond the mobile-friendly stuff, we will be rolling out features that we've been working on for way too long. There will be a lot of small improvements (like the ability to sort/filter stories on hubs by more criteria) and some very big ones. Number one on our list is allowing readers to Follow an author. It's similar to the existing Favorite Authors feature, but it changes the dynamic from "I like this author" to "I want to get news and new submissions from this author in my personal inbox".

A lot of our effort has been put into changes that we hope will empower Lit authors to attract more readers who are interested in their specific work - and then to help authors build a stronger relationship with those readers once they find them.

So, while design for design's sake hasn't been our focus, the Lit design will be updated significantly as we add major new features and move toward a universally mobile-friendly experience.

Thanks Manu,

I've brought this up before, but will there be a feature which will allow readers to customize the size & font of the story text?

That's probably the biggest feature I'd like to see added. Currently, in my opinion, the words are slightly too small.

thanks,

heyall