Design Comments & Suggestions

Mark

Mark

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I see that today the logo is changed. Yesterday's logo looked much better. The red is too loud and the line drawing is distracting away from the words "Signs of the Times". It looks very messy.

The red underline links are not very pleasing to the eye either. Why do the links even need to be underlined? Inserting dashes link underlines among the already-dashed table elements on the home page makes it look even more messy.

The former design had a really clean look to it.

The nav bar at the top is a confusing read. I think It needs some sort of separaters between words -- e.g. Forum | Podcast | Archive -- something like that.

One thing I do like is the lack of flash animations. Flash is nice and incredibly useful. But if developers don't allow a person to stop the animation (via a right-click menu) then it puts a huge load on a Web browser. The previous design only had the ability to stop one of the Flash animations. If you insert Flash please let us control the animation.

When I signed up for a new account in this new forum, the resulting page shows the Webmaster's email address in a clickable link. That will very quickly lead to a ton of junk mail . . .

I'm not sure why, but the site has a very slow response time today.
 
I wanted to say almost exactly the same thing, but I see that you have already.
Especially the proliferation of dashed lines!! It's way too hard to read.

I actually prefer the former design much more because it was all on one page and I didn't have to choose a topic. It was almost as if the Signs editors were there talking about one thing and then the next and the next, and they could flow from one to the other better. Signs can be overlooked (even on the Signs page) when there's no context as to why it might be important. So I found that I read hardly any of the articles yesterday when presented in the new format. I think the Comments at the bottom of the article often help me to distinguish what's what, and since I can't see them unless I choose a topic, then I'm done before I start.

Actually, I preferred the format before you started using CSS. Then when I cut and paste an article into an email, all the color and bolding of the text showed up. Now it does not. But sending articles in emails is the only way to get someone to read a piece of it, since there are no anchors to individual stories to send, and people couldn't find it on the large Signs page and wouldn't get the Signs Comments if they go directly to the original article link.
 
I agree with the comments about the dashed red lines underneath everything. Ugg! Any reason you're using "christmas" colors? ;-) I still think the header needs a bit more "oomph" but good job guyz!!
 
Red and Green are not Christmass Colours, they are Complimentary Colours, the extra colour came by massive request from users, sorry if it hurts the eyes, I am sure you will get used to it though.

There won't be much if any flash on the front page from now on, but if you use Firefox, there is a flash blocker software that forces movies not to play, you can download that.

The original logo wasn't meant to stay, and after much discussion, and feedback from various users, the new logo was created. It may be re worked overtime, but we feel it is off to a nice start. :)

Enjoy, and keep reading.
 
Change is, uhhh, good, right? I don't mind the red, the green, however, strikes me as a bit of a 'frog belly green' - not much energy to it. I know it's an enormous amount of work to re-work the site the way you have, so thank you - it's a nice change all in all. Heheheh, the red dashes under the links makes me think of extremely urgent bulletins from the war front...........hey, wait a minute, they are extremely urgent bulletins from the war front -- when do the U.S.O. dancers get here? And, of course, long live Le Frog. :)
 
Joy said:
I wanted to say almost exactly the same thing, but I see that you have already.
Especially the proliferation of dashed lines!! It's way too hard to read.

I actually prefer the former design much more because it was all on one page and I didn't have to choose a topic. It was almost as if the Signs editors were there talking about one thing and then the next and the next, and they could flow from one to the other better. Signs can be overlooked (even on the Signs page) when there's no context as to why it might be important. So I found that I read hardly any of the articles yesterday when presented in the new format. I think the Comments at the bottom of the article often help me to distinguish what's what, and since I can't see them unless I choose a topic, then I'm done before I start.

Actually, I preferred the format before you started using CSS. Then when I cut and paste an article into an email, all the color and bolding of the text showed up. Now it does not. But sending articles in emails is the only way to get someone to read a piece of it, since there are no anchors to individual stories to send, and people couldn't find it on the large Signs page and wouldn't get the Signs Comments if they go directly to the original article link.
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Hi Joy, there are those who found the old signs page too much and too long to scroll through all at once, and then there are those who liked it. The current format offers a little of both. On the one hand you have the topics clearly delineated, but if you click on any link in any topic you are taken to a page where you have all of the articles (with commentary) in that topic in one page. So it's not too much to quickly scan the topics and articles therein and then click a link, is it?

Joe
 
Hi,

I like the new look - the open and unfolding box. I guess everyone sees color a little differently. I would only suggest a deeper red, not quite so bright, or mute it a bit to blend better with the pink. hmmm. I know that sounds girly.

I like it a lot.

Tina
 
anart said:
Change is, uhhh, good, right? I don't mind the red, the green, however, strikes me as a bit of a 'frog belly green' - [...]
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Change Gud, ~droolz~

Frog Belly Green, that's Fabulous!

anart said:
And, of course, long live Le Frog. =)
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Yeah, He is starting to get alot of fan mail, which has so gone to his head, he has started ordering people around, and at night he keeps hogging the covers!
 
Get used to bright red and green? Let's hope you're not a fashion designer! LOL !

OK, just a bit of humour :-) But seriously, I probably wouldn't buy your line of clothes. Well, maybe the socks. :-)

M
 
Joe said:
On the one hand you have the topics clearly delineated, but if you click on any link in any topic you are taken to a page where you have all of the articles (with commentary) in that topic in one page. So it's not too much to quickly scan the topics and articles therein and then click a link, is it? Joe
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I do find the page to be much more succinct and after finishing reading one "section" I have some time to digest it. And after a few minutes, I will move on to a new topic section. It helps to not have the whole page to go through, all at once so to speak. I am not so concerned with the Signs of the Times header, I think that having a less bulky page to display will be helpful to the readers on slow connections who may have to wait a while do d/l all the Flash and jpegs that the page uses. I do like the specialized headers for the weekend podcasts, those should be continued imho.

One thing I wanted to note, I tried to hyperlink to one of the sub-sections and I get a 404 error. Is it that only a direct link to Signs is possible? It's entirely possible I just muffed the code for the hyperlink though.

Overall, I think the site is good change. This does remind me a bit more of other, more mainstream websites. And it should be a little less "heavy" for any new readers. Great job guys :cool:
 
How about a link that makes a PDF file for printing various sections and their associated articles (or maybe even all current news from the home page) ? There are some cool PHP scripts out there that can do that. Here's a link to a site in France that has some PHP code (HTML2PDF looks pretty good, but it only supports JPG and PNG graphics) and links to even more code:

http://webxadmin.free.fr/article/convert-html-or-php-to-pdf-330.php

M
 
Design Comments & Suggestions

The new format of the SOTT page itself is fine (maybe an improvement?); I just want to protest the format of this, the comment/forum section.

The way it was before was good, exactly because all subjects were discussed in 1 place. That facilitated making connections, the antidote to The Matrix's programming. Splitting up the comments into separate subjects means many people will only look at subjects they already think/know are of interest to them, and not learn of what they do not already know to search for. This is in alignment with what The Matrix "wants", rather than w/ the mission, isn't it?
 
Design Comments & Suggestions

There were a few problems with the old board too though. You couldn't directly link to a topic or a post, at least not for much longer than a couple of days, because it would get pushed onto another page. All of the discussions eventually got lost in the past. That can happen here, but a good thing is, old and current topics can be linked to within other topics, and connections can be made that way. Also with the new forum, the topics can't easily be distracted or changed, so they can evolve more on the actual topic, instead of a "general" topic which isn't so focussed, imo.
 
Design Comments & Suggestions

I was trying to copy and paste some paragraphs from the articles into somewhere else, but when I try and highlight just the part I want to copy, the entire article (plus the header!) all highlights also! Is there a trick to doing this I'm unaware of?
 
Design Comments & Suggestions

Shar said:
I was trying to copy and paste some paragraphs from the articles into somewhere else, but when I try and highlight just the part I want to copy, the entire article (plus the header!) all highlights also! Is there a trick to doing this I'm unaware of?
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Yep, it takes a bit of finesse, are you using firefox?

If you are selecting outside the div then then most renderers will force you to grab the entire entity. Try doing it in the source, or closer to the text, it just takes some practice.
 
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