I've been working on the design this morning. It seems that the svillage.mine.nu design and Rama's design are intended to be similar in almost all ways except the colors and graphics, probably because everything originates from Kidd Cabbage's initial drawing.
I like Rama's design a lot, and it is very impressive.
I did come to one conclusion that I think I'm ready to make a decision on: there should not be a separate news section on the front page. Rama points out the reason why in his image: there is not enough news to put there. If a news section is included, it needs to be updated daily or weekly, and I have to do it, diverting time from other things. If there isn't any news for a while, it looks like the site is stagnant. The news wouldn't be able to be commented upon using the current interface, so people would have to go to the forums anyway. It takes up space that could be better used to promote songs. Unless there's a huge public uproar over this suggestion, I think the idea of a separate "news" section should be put to rest.
Also, right now I'm just addressing the layout issues. As you can see, both designs use the exact same layout, but use different images and colors. Once the layout is settled, then I say we can move onto what's sure to be a much more difficult issue, deciding upon colors, because everyone seems to like different colors.
Now, to address Rama's image comments:
1. I agree with him that the spacing was poor even before he made the image, but just hadn't gotten around to it. I reduced the spacing in the latest version.
2. I agree that only three columns for promoted things should be visible, and implemented that.
The image also points out that song grids take up too much room because the profile and VGMdb album covers are unnecessary. That is a significant technical challenge to address.
You might say to simply list the games the track is influenced by, without any other information. The problem is that the VGMdb associates games with albums, not with individual tracks. If a user selects an influence from a compilation album, the games of every single track from the album are listed together in one field. There is no way of determining which particular game this particular track is based off of. Instead, a list of "Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros 2., Super Mario Bros. 3, ...." is returned.
The images add character to these grids, also, so I don't think they should be axed altogether.
After thinking about this a little more, I came to the conclusion that maybe grids aren't the ideal way to display songs. For example, there could be a "scrollable" interface using the JQuery Tools (
http://flowplayer.org/tools/demos/index.html). We should really think outside the box and consider what could be done if tables were eliminated altogether.
If you plan to look at the Dev site, log in so that you can see the changes to the top bar that appear when you do so. Also, the streaming plugins were changed - this was a recommendation that shawnphase made two months ago that I've agreed with, and had put off until the redesign. Finally, the "random song" really isn't random; it's selected from songs above a certain threshold (five, currently).