Official New Design Thread

Thanks a whole bunch for denting our revenue right there, revenue that keeps this place alive. Nice one. I guess a free service just aint good enough

 

Get's a Smashie and Nicey, 'Noice!'

 

Cheeky!

 

You rock.

Is it at all possible to change the background colour of the posting window? It's currently set as #ECE9D8 which against the retro #CCCCCC grey looks very out of place tbh. But other than that...

 

Can't be just me

 

you'll get your revenue, i might have just moved the ad's.

 

Not sure where to ask this.

Is everyone getting a big black space between the hardware....modding.....columns part and the bit where the search bit is at the top. I assume there to be an advert to go there. Ive checked adblock thats clear, JS is working (as gooooooooogle adds are there)

/me is confused

 

Nicely done, but...

RTT! and kna,

I know you've mentioned ads = bandwidth, and I agree fully. However, there needs to be a slight amount of concern for those of us who use and love the forums on a daily basis and on lower resolutions. Can we strike a balance here?

For instance, I have currently had to resize my browser 3 times to manage to make the right bar (a whopping 170px, which is a LOT of real estate) not be over top of text in firefox, and the top bit-tech banner is large and obtrusive throughout.

I love the front site, though I do have a few minor design complaints. The color coordination of pages to section is a very nice touch, but it should be a touch as opposed to the only way to determine location. It would be better if all of the sections you were not on were a single color, and the section you were on being its own color...for now it's hard to see which section you are on without looking at nuance colors around the page or a tiny text line in the left corner (which you have to strain to see against all the flashy things). To me, that's what a menu is for - to tell you where you are and where you can go, and this does not do that. Aside from that, the new organization is very beneficial, if a little large.

As for the forum, posts now feel dwarfed by all of these ads, banners, and a huge bit-tech banner on a 1024x768 screen. I bet it looks fine on 1600x1200, but I don't want to develop eyestrain just to have a proper page layout. If all of this could just be resized for resolution, it would be so much better. When a site has content with supporting ads, that's fine. But when a site looks like ads with supporting content, that's bad. As said before, this isn't a knock on the ads, just that some resizing has to be done!

By the way, no offense (meaning I'm about to offend someone, I'm sure), but did anyone bother to verify the code?! There's 48 errors to this posting page alone. Many of these errors are just sloppy coding, like leaving off closing tags and not using proper markup for ampersands and the like.

 

little niggle - the 'post icons' are still the garish coloured ones. any chance the old ones can be restored?

 

Re: code errors, most of those are produced by the banners which we have zero control over

 

Why not just use the browser maximised?

Errors often creep in when the page is dynamically created.
(Plus they may be needed to persude IE to show it correctly.)

 

Hows that?

 

Jazzle,

When I'm at work, which is where I'm often reading bit-tech in the background because I'm a horrible human being, I cannot run my browser maximized. Nor do I often want to. Resizeability is part of what makes dynamic content work.

And unfortunately, as much as I would love to say the coding errors are ad related, many of them are just sloppy stuff like using & instead of &amp;, and <img> instead of <img />. Not to mention the CSS issues with my non-maximized browser.

I would think those to be legitimate complaints... I don't mean to be a pain, but they are issues which could be addressed without sacrificing the ads or anything. I just don't want to see people get turned off to our wonderful community. Change drives away some people no matter what, but things like resizeability are something most of us expect.

 

Much nicer kna! My eyes salute you.

 

i cant see the word forum on my school laptops.

 

I'm going to be the billionth person to say this, but having ads down the right hand side of the forums is very irritating!

Secondly, the first thing I thought when I saw the new front page is "where do the ads stop and the content begin?" The "news" column looks like a google ad column, and the photos/article list on the LHS just looks like a whole load of ads.

Finally, the forums and the main page look very cramped to my eyes (on 1024x768). Not everyone has monitors capable of 1600x1200!!

Sam

 

sorry, didn't see that before - there are a vast number of replies here.

to rephrase the question:
will the 'new' ones be recoloured/replaced?

 

Uncertain.. I won't lie and say I'm 100% happy with them either, I'm working on some potential better ones but they're not top priority right now.