G&T Redesign #232472 News Posted by John Hoare on 20th May 2007, 09:00 Erm, hello. Look what we did. Curved corners are so last year, darlings. But we did them anyway. A few points, then: There are no new site features, apart from the new selected articles section on the front page, and the belated re-addition of our contact form. It’s all purely cosmetic. So don’t go hunting around for anything clever. We’ve dropped support for IE 5/5.5, as with IE7 now out, we can’t be arsed supporting broken browsers that are now two versions out-of-date. Sorry. The site is now fixed width, and is suitable for resolutions of 1024×768 or higher. Yes, I am aware this makes me a complete and utter fucking hypocrite. In my defence, the idea is to provide other themes for the site for displays with lower resolutions, but… well, we haven’t got round to it yet. Navigation seriously needs improving here and there; this will be done in the upcoming weeks. Pagination desperately needs adding to long comment and forum threads, but unfortunately the built-in stuff our CMS provides is rather counter-intuitive – so I’ve added links to the bottom of threads until we can sort this out. Hope you like it – let us know what you think below. And if you’re wondering why this article is bereft of my usual charm and wit, that’s because I haven’t been witty since 1987.
I like it so far, but then that may be because it’s shiny and new and novelty dazzles my tiny sparrow-like brain =P . Further opinions as soon as I’ve used it a bit more.
I like it, except for the big boxes underneath the banner heading which have “Site Update”, “Latest News” and “From the Archive” written in them. They kinda uglify the whole thing. Oh, yeah, and I don’t like the maroon colour of the boxes here either. Good design otherwise.
>Curved corners are so last year, darlings. But we did them anyway. I like to think they’re fashionably unfashionable.
I like how you brought back the old picture of White Midget approaching Red Dwarf on the banner. I was just thinking yesterday how it was a shame you didn’t use it anymore, then all of a sudden, you bring it back!
To answer the various criticisms so far: Mick, if you send an screengrab of the site in iBrowse to jhoare@gmail.com, I’ll have a look at it. I am not entirely convinced by the look of the selected boxes on the front page either – so much so that I nearly got rid of them before the launch whilst I had another think about them. I think they very nearly work – but not quite. Something to look at, anyway. I love the maroon headers, though.
I like it. I don’t know how to make a thumbs-up smiley, so I’ll mail you a pencil and you can draw one yourself.
Excellent. Looking much more professional. Not that it didn’t before, I hasten to add, but it’s a definite improvement.
What the hell is with that cack favicon? It’s the favicon for the CMS system we use – I forgot to change it. I’ll fix it later.
Selected articles on the front page temporarily removed. I agree with what Antipodean said – they didn’t quite work as well as they should, and they were *very* flakey if you had a non-standard text size. I’ll have a rethink on them – they’ll definitely be back in some form.
You have blatently stolen my laptop and pinched the curved corners idea off my Sega Saturn website John :P Tis looking good though dude :)
The only thing I have an issue with is the small number of At Speed entries that are fully accessible. Only having three makes it more difficult to get to the new comments on entries a few further in – such as the CGI UK one at the moment, which would have been accessible before the redesign – especially since most entries get comments for quite some time after publication. The solution could be either to increase the number of fully accessible articles, or to introduce comment links on the ‘title only’ entries.
Yeah, I think you’re right. In fact, I was planning to add comment links to the lower set of At Speed articles myself… I’ll add them later today.
How come the poll of the new website is listed so nicely? And how come whenever it’s something to do with Red Dwarf the negative comments end in uck anker iss and my favorite tard? Still I like it, looks cleaner, and I didn’t mind the quick link boxes. When you have a minute, kock us up a Fan Club one will ya!
I agree with Michael Warren- too few ‘at speed’ articles fully shown. It looks very ‘crunched in’, compared to the quite spacey look of the previous layout. Apart from that it looks quite nice.
I don’t think it’s terrible by any means – it validates, it’s relatively semantic, and alt text is all present and correct (albeit cheated occasionally – some of them should be properly descriptive) – but I think it could definitely be improved.
try and use it in a text browser. it’s annoying. there’s no h1 tag on the page, lists of links without the ability to skip them.. it doesn’t hold up as a great example of web accessibility.
Yeah, the skip links were one of the things I was thinking of. I’ll add them. There *are* h1 headings on each page apart from the front page, though. It was an oversight not to have them on the front page, mind. Again, I’ll add them.
