Your Opinion Counts (#2!) | Website Upgrades

We're back once again with another episode of "Your Opinion Counts"!

For the rest of the day, and possibly tomorrow we will be doing upgrades on the site and updating things. Please tell us below if you're having any problems, or if there are things you don't like. We love to have your feedback on these type of things, so please tell us what you think!

-Chip-
First Minister

P.S. Don't say you voted, this isn't a real vote, just a little poll to help us out.

Just keep it normal. Please.

You are like Mark Zuckerburg, you change Facebook's layout right when everyone gets used to it...

If only I were Mark Zuckerburg

We made these changes because they are the completion of our previous attempts to have a more modern feel to the forums. This includes the upgrade from the antiquated PHPBB2 software to PHPBB3, which means all browsers will see the ticker fine and it is better designed in my opinion. Although we will tweek small things over time, this will most likely be the last major revamp of the design.

No offence. But it sucks

Tell me your gripes and I'll see what I can do, but if you just say it sucks all that tells me is you think it sucks.

If you can't give a good reason, it's staying like it is, because we think it looks good.

This one is all confusing, and I always find myself on the verge of pressing the wrong button

There's your reason why I don't like it

The old one just looked better. The Navbar looks worse (I liked the round one) and I liked the blue more than this grey for the forums themself.... it looks too dull for me. And the announcements ticker looks terrible, and the forum homepage looks really dumb too (the Arial and the blue highlights looked much better)

And I agree with Daniel about the other.

EDIT: To make it all the better, just put it back to where it originally was. Nobody will complain if you do that

I also liked the blue... In general, I agree with K50 on this subject

First of all I hate the names/avatars on the right side.

I overall liked the old one better. Everything seemed to fit more and it was more neutral in color rather than all this white blinding me. There's a reason my wallpaper is near-black.

By the way guys, we aren't done. We are still working with this new design. The choice of colors however is a personal preference, personally I find this new scheme much more ascetically pleasing.

The nav bar discussion is essentialy a moot point, as the only difference is a rounded end. This one matches much better and this new design finally lets us be rid of the useless superfluous space at the top of the site.

The announcements ticker can be edited separately and most likely will.

I don't get what you don't like about the homepage. In my opinion it looks much better than before, the old fashion table lines were frankly ugly. This new design has a very modern shadow effect that isn't as bulky.

Now it's starting to look a lot better

Its more familiar for me...

The blue on the portals is far too dark - use different colours for the different images. It doesn't work with the light background tone.
The font and text size on the posts, ticker and forums/categories is far too small and I preferred the old one.
It looks really clunky to me atm.

Again, we'll be working on it through out the day, working with the fonts colors. We've already moved the profile thing from the right to the left and we're working on the rest.

Also a small note, You can have signatures now.

I hope you guys have looked at the poll..... in particular the "can we change back?" part...

Considering we're the admins, and the admins job is to keep the site up to date, that's what we're doing. Also, it's not finished, there's better stuff to come.

Sorry the site was down for a while, but at times it was in a state that was by no means presentable.

I have isolated the CSS classes that apply to several things we wanted to fix and instituted those fixes. This mainly involves the spacing of forum titles from the icons and of course putting the profiles back in the left side. As I am messing with this it is possible that fixing one thing causes another bug, as happened when i originally changed the spacing of the icons and titles. If you notice any bugs please report them. A few things are inexplicably strangely colored which can be easily fixed, and there appears to be a strange glitch in the iOS version of Safari involving the placement of the profiles next to posts.

We are attempting, as you have seen, to address your concerns with this new design. If you have any specific problems please tell us, vague comments like "this sucks" do not cause me to spontaneously realize what you think is wrong. On this same idea saying that you aren't used to it or it looks to sterile or whatever just tells me that you haven't adjusted to it yet because it's something different or you're resisting adjusting just to gripe. The background color issue has been addressed, and colors with more "character" have replaced the clinical grays.

I will continue to document changes as I make them in this thread. This changeover is not complete, I repeat NOT complete. We have this process open like this to allow for a input during the tinkering stage so we can produce a finished product that is suitable to everyone's individual desires (or as many of those as we can meet, we can't make everyone happy) and fits our outward image as a new and modern union with innovative ideas.

Also, we will not be changing back the design, regardless of what the poll says, until after we are done finished with these edits. If at the end of this you are all still displeased, it can be changed.

-Jon

Some browser testing has revealed something interesting and frustrating.











Notice how some of the browsers interpret the font used by our forums differently than others. This is kind of annoying because I was very happy with the way the font looked in Opera, but the way it appears in Firefox and other browsers is rather ugly.

So, we will now be taking font suggestions, so if you have any preference please share.

Arial. Just like it used to be....

The font is set as Arial. For some reason all browsers except IE and Opera are outputting it as Times New Roman.

We are working on a fix at the moment.

Turns out it wasn't TImes New Roman, but Trebuchet MS.

There must be a glitch in the CSS or a browser quirk that is causing all the browsers except IE and Opera to ignore the body font and use the title font for everything. I have remedied this by simply changing the title font to Arial.

We've worked with the icons, tell us what you think. Do you like the round or the square ones better, either fit, but we think the round look more modern with this template.

I like the rounded rectangle. it looks modern than both square or circle..