Waking up to a new world

http://www.bit-tech.net/columns/2005/05/06/column_new_world/

 

Great article, at first like everyone else I was skeptical (sp?) due to all the crazy colours and basically, due to change, but its already grown on me and its so much easier to find stuff now! welldone Bit-tech!

- M@

 

^^^Seconded.

- H.

 

Yup I fully agree with what M@ said, I'm starting to like the new site design and the new functionality is definitely a very handy addition.

 

I think M@ said it in a nutshell. Now that I've looked around the amin site a bit, it's really changed my views on the change. Before, when I saw the old layout, I thought "THAT is bit-tech", but now, when I see the new layout, I think "THIS is bit-tech."

_C

 

Hehe - I'm glad you guys are coming around. TBH, the old design WAS "bit-tech" for some 2+ years, changing only for the logo update last May. So it's hardly surprising that loads of people feel / felt attached to it...

However, it seems my hopes that the stength of the new design will win people over are coming true

 

I am still adapting to this new design, I feel like I liked the other one better just because I was so used to it.

 

After using the layout, i really like how it works; however, im still not a fan of the buttons and some of the colouring/alignment.

I love the layout though, it works nicely. Good work, its very 'journalistic' for the want of a better word

I've posted a quick photoshop in the 'new design' thread.

 

Just so long as you don't start inserting links into the article for the sole purpose of advertising. So many other sites will create links out of random text in the article that take you to one of their advertisers. They have those pop-up text boxes when you hover over them so I suppose I can't say I didn't know where the link would go, but those are the most annoying of all. I hope someone knows what I'm talking about here. As long as this never happens, no format change could ever make me stop reading bit-tech, though this one was definitely for the better.

 

There was a thread on this a while back, when everyone was asked if they thought advertising like that in the forums was a good idea. Thankfully, (almost) everyone voted no.

_C

 

lookin great to me

 

Pezboy: they're called IntelliTXT, those "sponsored keywords" and they annoy the living crap out of me too, so don't worry about that.

Actually, the main problem with them is they will highlight generic words like "graphics card" and then link you to eBay.com ffs. Most people don't mind contextual advertising (ie the way Google tries to present ads that are relevant to the page topic) but as with the graphical ads, you're at the mercy of who had advertising budget that month.

At the end of the day, I'm not prepared to splash green keywords all over bit-tech just to advertise bloody eBay

UPDATE: it's actually worth me pointing out that there IS money even in the lameness described above. However, we listened to reader feedback and ignored webmasters who told me that people get used to it, or only a vocal minority complain etc, and we decided NOT to run them.

HOWEVER, since we turned down that "easy" money, which would pay for servers / bandwidth, we had to make up for it in other places, hence (to a certain extent) the presence of those skyscrapers over there on the right. So I just thought I would take a second to explain that while a few people hate those skyscrapers, surely they are INFINITELY more tolerable than Keywords, right?

 

not half!!

 

New site is nice- forums def brighter and easier on eyes - but one complaint! Cutting and pasting from other posts is almost impossible One example if someones selling an XYZ - I may want to google for XYZ in case I might wanna buy one Surely none of our posts are that good they need anti-theft protection

 

Hmmm, not sure about the games section. I come here for the tech and go to a dedicated games site for the games. Just trying to help you with some feebacK, you might change my mind yet!

 

Hope its not too long before all the old small modding articles are back as I'm still using them for my own projects. Things such as the 3G Clear article and an old LED board which had 2 sets of LEDs for hard drive activity 8 green then 8 blue when active, was just about to make that one

 

Yeah it would be great to see those back

edit \\ I just checked, some of em are back up there allready in the modding archive. Great!

 

So the new sites been up some time now but nothing has been added to the modding archive. There's loads of older articles that I'm still wanting to browse through and try, when will they see the light of day again?

 

In my humble opinion..the modding / articles sections are horrendously cluttered and I much preferred the old layout of those pages. That may be because I'm sentimental old a fuddy duddy though.

Having said that, BT is much quicker and feels much more stable now. While the new template isn't amazing, it's also not awful. It's perfect in this respect, because it keeps functionality while looking nice enough not to be aesthetically painful to browse.

I love the way the article pages themselves are set out, especially with the pictures of the authors.

Overall, I think it's been a worthwhile change. Good job you guys.

---

EDIT: In agreement with the guy above though, it would be nice to see the old articles..

 

Yes, they will. Right now I have the following on my ToDo:

Macro Black
3GClear
Wooden PC
WMD

There is a HUUUGE list of stuff to choose from, and most articles take 30-90 minutes to convert, so are being done according to demand: some ancient stuff may never be ported because it was only being read once a month if that.

But if you have anything specific you want to request, I can add it to my list. But please appreciate that there is a fine balance between porting of archive content all day, and still bringing you guys the latest & greatest (like 15 pages of GeForce 7800 GTX love yesterday)