Official New Design Thread

I personally think that putting "Home Page" instead of "Homepage" would look better in the top blue bar. Especially since they're 2 separate words.

 

*yawn* It sucks, get off your high horse!

 

I think it had to many, bright colors. It is a littlebil "disco" but it is easyer to use.

 

I like it,very nice and clear. I miss the icon that said I posted here, now I can't find my posts!

 

The Retro theme for the forums is bomber, kudos on that! I also like how you divided the content up, it makes this site a lot easier to surf through and read what you want to read. Finally, I noticed that under moddind, you hilighted a few of the best mods currently on the forums. YEAH! I think this is a great idea, because not that many articles crop up in modding, so it is cool to see some sort of modding going on there.

My one beef with the new website is the side ads. I don't even care about the Google ads. It's just that flashy ad that gets on my nerves when I'm reading threads, because it grabs your eyes so much. I understand that you need the ads to help keep the site funded and whatnot, so I don't have any real suggestions as to what to do with it. Put it on the bottom maybe? I don't know.

All in all, good design.

 

Wow. I'm gone for a couple weeks and come back with the place all funny looking! I like the new layout on the front page, its easier to find what I'm looking for and seems faster moving around, although it's so 2D feeling as the old look flowed better, a bit more rounded and polished if you will, felt like I was actually clicking on buttons instead of a colored peice of paper. The only real thing that bothers me is the color associated with the forums - swap the "news" and "forum" colors at the top of the screen. The banners don't bother me at all but that Bright Blue Bar along the side behind them is awfully distracting. And I was so scared with the color scheme until I saw the "v4 Retro" then I was all ok again.

 

Forums back to normal

Sorry I didn't read the whole thread, I read in several pages and realised it had already hit 22-23 so I thought I'd just tag a vote on the end. As long as there's a legit reason for the kiddy crayon buttons then I don't mind
(Once we persuade all the 56kers to sign up to broadband could we get nice buttons )

 

this thread has served its purpose. suggest it gets closed.

 

I've said this privately to people, but I may as well say it out in the open too, god knows you need some positivity in this thread

I was highly doubtful about v4 being the answer to everyone's prayers - while I could see the inherent limitations in the v3 design and was annoyed by the sheer unfriendliness when trying to find anything, I wasn't sure how that was going to change overnight. I see now that I was wrong. In the last two days a review of a rather mundane piece of hardware (exclusive or not, the Volari V3XT isn't exactly exciting) has been featured on slashdot, and the new News content has completely opened my eyes to just how much I was missing by not venturing out of the 5 or 6 forums that I frequent on a daily basis. Between that, the RSS feeds, the friendly buttons linking me straight to the parts of the site I actually want to visit (what's the point of moaning about a few extra colours, they really do help with navigation), and the new layout that actually entices me to read articles, I'm already reading the main site a lot more.

The new site design has grown on me hugely since I first saw it, certain features jumped out at me immediately but there are still things that I'm still coming to appreciate - those banner-style article headlines really rock - but most importantly, the back end of the site that most of us never see must have been improved significantly. I can only conclude that the increased amount and quality of news items (absolutely no insult to GOO intended, there's only so much you can do in forum posts) is a result of the ease of use of the site. Anything that encourages more content must be praised highly. It only makes it more plain that a change was needed when the positive results of that change are so obvious.

To all of you who are saying "I don't like it, and I won't ever" - be open-minded, and see what happens in the weeks to come, both in your eyes and in the site itself. In my opinion this is a huge step forward for bit-tech, and inconveniencing a few people who aren't big fans of change is a small price to pay. Of course I don't love everything about the new site, but banners that most of the time I'm oblivious to and a bit less width than I'd like on a 1600x1200 screen are small prices to pay for what I think's been accomplished here.

Excuse the essay, I'm just a bit excited

 

I must agree, I now find myself using the main site more than I ever did before, I was unsure of the look at first but it has grown on me.

The more you use the main site the more you can see where the hard work has been put in.

Still dissapointed not to see any news of the bit-tech forums CS team exploits against Hexus and MPUK in the Gaming section.

 

Unfortunately that would me my job Yoda, I am not able to log into the back end because of very limited and slow internet access. I hope, once NTHell pull their fingers out of their asses, I will back to full staff capability. Then I'll get some bt CS:S front page news.

 

Ohhhhh v4 Retro is very very nice. Well done guys makes the forums look much nicer. Although tbh even it the site was bright pink and yellow I'd still visit.

 

well, i like the new site. more content is always good!

regarding the bright blue ad bar down the side of the forums, i know its that colour to fit the forum section branding (and been mentioned lots...), but maybe the dark blueyishy/greeny colour used for the background on the homepage would be less distracting and still fit the scheme of things.

anyways, nice site

RoB

 

OMFG lol i came here today and thought you guys had closed or somthin. New design is awsome

Neo

 

Sorry guys, but I'm not that impressed. It's harder to see on the front page what's new now that it's been chunked down into categories far more, and I don't think increasing the number of clicks needed to navigate is a good thing

 

increased clicks? please elucidate.

 

Before, if I wanted to see an older article, I clicked Articles and there it was. The layout there wasn't ideal, it could've been better segmented, but it was 2 clicks from homepage to article. Now if I want to see an older article, I click eg. Hardware, Archive, click through 3 pages of 'archives' and then select an article. This is slow.

Also, I know it's already been posted in Bugs, but did you even test this site under IE? Images mess it up, the forums are terrible to use, I've seen at least 1 article where there's a screen of whitespace beside the advert before the article body - the list goes on... Oh, and the adverts are driving me insane.

 

1) search - that is what it's there for But ok, if you're just browsing then yeah, you could end up clicking a lot. However, yuo're much more likely to find stuff rather than our old indexes which would throw 400 articles onto one page in text only!

2) we're aware of that and i'm fairly sure that Jamie has worked out the problem, so we'll be fixing that ASAP It's only limited to IE though, and very intermittently too.

There will always be bug that surface only when you're out of testing and into a 'production' environment

 

Sorry, but search is not a good solution. It's a handy function to be sure, but it's no replacement for being able to browse properly.

Oh well, not to worry, I'm sure you'll get the IE bugs fixed soon, I'll just have to get used to the crazy new layout

Cheers.

 

Sure, but if you have ideas of how to archive 100's of articles in a better way than we have done (that does not require extreme scrolling) I'd love to hear them!