New Design

Wow! It's a very nice design work and color. I login as usual and I thought I must have click on a different website for a moment as I normally use my favorites link and expected to see the fuzzy image and blue scanning lines.

Yes, excellent work by Megan.

Regards.
NSS

[Edited by NSS on Jan. 17, 2001 at 04:23 AM]

Yes, pretty nice! I'm assuming a banner will be going to the right of the logo, correct? Anyway, I'm moving this to the Forum Specific Comments...

Yay! It's so cool to see it up there !!!! I'm so excited!! And thanks to everyone for complementing on it!!!

(and yes, the grey space is for a banner ad. I always think that banner ads look better if they're designed into the page)

Not too shabby!

Quote: (and yes, the grey space is for a banner ad. I always think that banner ads look better if they're designed into the page)

Yep, I agree 100%.

Glad everyone likes it... The kudos of course go to Megan for the great design as you have already done.

I am really impressed too. I like the red because it brightens things up.

I was up til 3:00 AM this morning working on it and I got all the main pages updated. I will be spending the day today working on putting the polling system online, getting every single page updated with the new design, putting Max's 'newest threads' link and a number of other links back, and taking care of some administrative things.

Within the next couple of weeks, I will be putting a member banner system together. The moderators have already discussed this and they all think it is a great idea, as do I. And yes, that is what the dead gray space is for. I will let everyone know what the requirements are for your banner rotation when I get closer to being able to set that up.

Stay tuned... I know a lot of you have been worried that TWF is going downhill... It has been, but once I have the new design, I will be working on building the traffic up again and I hope that all of you that have continued to support TWF through this slow time will be here to help out.

P.S. We have a really cool idea brewing in the moderator forum for picking up traffic that I hope we can get going soon too!

Well, as it happens, I'm working from another computer at the moment. Didn't have the bookmark, so I had to looks through all the variations of the domain names (there are also webmasterforums.com webmastersforum.com amd webmasterforum.com - took me a while to think about the hyphen )

So, my first reaction was - oops, wrong again. Yet something about the forums names was too familiar...

Great design Megan! Much more lively! Too much blues around web sites as it is. This will be much more memorable.

Looks great. I thought I came to a different site for a second.

Yes, great design Megan

Looks great!

Maybe the links along the upper right (forums,profile, etc) could be images just to jazz it up a bit?

Very uniform throughout, great job.

Peter,

I thought about graphics up top for the links, but I really want to keep the load down as much as possible. I don't notice a graphics intensive site because of my DSL connection, but we have an extremely large portion of visitors that are on 56k or lower and loading 5 additional graphics that aren't needed really doesn't make sense.

I may do it anyway though ... Have to see what type of mood I am in tonight when I do a little more work.

Anyone really think it would matter to put the top five links into graphics?

Chad,

Optimized images of that size would be very small (file size) even for dial-up users. It looks great the way it is, I just thought that maybe by using a graphic you could break out of the horizontal bar, just to add a little more flair.

Hi Chad,

In my opinion, it's just fine using text links and if converted to image links it will only clutter it with too many images when you have the banner later on in the grey area on top of the text links.

Regards,
NSS

I like the new design also-
I would like the new posts link too, though.. I know you have a link on the main page, but I'm talking about the link that you can click on that would bring you to the new posts in a thread.

If you could add that, it would be perfect.

Brian

*applause*

Nice job! It was a much-needed change for the better. It's still not perfect, I'll be posting a new thread in a second with my suggested improvements.

Brian,

There is a "Last Post" link on the main page for each forum that takes you to the latest post in that forum... Is that the link you are looking for? If not, would you point out another forum that has the link you are looking for because I am lost..

OK, I think I found the link you were referring to ... is that the one that appears at the top of the forumdisplay.php page now Brian?

I think he's talking about the "first unread post" link here:
http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=4193

I like the new look too. Red is a nice change.

Red is better than blue. To many web sites use Blue.

Hi all! I hope everyone is well!

I certainly like the new design.
A few pointers for Mega/Chad:
- The font is wrong for the design. CLose but not quite right, I would highly recommend playibng with new fonts and caps combinations to get the fell/weright of the log perfect.
- though slick I think is it a bit flat. Have you tried applying some filters? Megabn if you send me thePhotoshop file I can work on it over the weekend for an hour and see what I come up with...

When you get to posts the red disapears, any chance of looking itno this as it makes it a bit boring.

Still exploring the rest, good to see a change on the site.
JP

yep, congrats guys, it is very neat I like it more and more.

any chance of getting member totals added to the front page. I always thought it impressed new visitors and showed people this was not one of those dead forums.

thoughts?

Good to see you're still around JP!

Quote: - The font is wrong for the design. CLose but not quite right, I would highly recommend playibng with new fonts and caps combinations to get the fell/weright of the log perfect.

I think the font is actually good for the design. I really like verdana because it is a smooth flowing font. Plus, with the "round" font used in the logo, it works well.

Quote: - though slick I think is it a bit flat. Have you tried applying some filters? Megabn if you send me thePhotoshop file I can work on it over the weekend for an hour and see what I come up with...

Since the site is more for information sharing and less of a graphics display, I don't really think it needs to have millions of graphics. For this site, I think "form and function" outweigh design. I like the clean, simple design and don't really think cluttering it with more intense graphics is going to accomplish anything more.

Quote: When you get to posts the red disapears, any chance of looking itno this as it makes it a bit boring.

Agreed. I will be making the gray buttons that appear with each post red so that it takes care of this suggestion.

Quote: any chance of getting member totals added to the front page. I always thought it impressed new visitors and showed people this was not one of those dead forums.

After I do some spring cleaning of the member database, I will be posting stats (total members, total posts, etc.) on the main page. This will happen after I have the banner system up and running.

Thanks for the suggestions JP, and everyone else!

Chad,

Problem that probably should be fixed ASAP. The banner is above the logo part. It is supposed to be in the gray section. Correct? The banner shows up on every page too. The redirect pages etc.

Yes, that's probably because I'm working on it.

Oh sorry. When I posted that you weren't logged in or on ICQ so I just wanted to let you know.

Quote: Originally posted by Chad Simper
Good to see you're still around JP!

good to be back mate!

Quote: I think the font is actually good for the design. I really like verdana because it is a smooth flowing font. Plus, with the "round" font used in the logo, it works well.

well working in this field I must stand by my comment, though it looks far from bad, it could be improved - just needs fiddling. Megan, what do you say?

Quote: Since the site is more for information sharing and less of a graphics display, I don't really think it needs to have millions of graphics. For this site, I think "form and function" outweigh design. I like the clean, simple design and don't really think cluttering it with more intense graphics is going to accomplish anything more.

oh for sure, but I'm asking for more depth to be put into the header - not for more clutter far from it.

Quote: After I do some spring cleaning of the member database, I will be posting stats (total members, total posts, etc.) on the main page. This will happen after I have the banner system up and running.

what exactly will the spring cleaning conist of?
can you briefly explain the banner system (standard exchange?) as I missed those conversations.

JP

Try to make the header more 3Dish. Maybe some sort of drop shadow to the text or something.

I agree with JP.

Ravi

Quote: well working in this field I must stand by my comment, though it looks far from bad, it could be improved - just needs fiddling. Megan, what do you say?

And working in the field as well, I have to stand by my comment ... I'm not usually a really stubborn person but on this one, I am sticking by my choice. Verdana is going to remain the font.

Quote: oh for sure, but I'm asking for more depth to be put into the header - not for more clutter far from it.

I'm not against changing it... I think it looks good as is but if you or anyone else want to take a stab at improving it, feel free to do so. If it is an imrpovement, we'll defintily change it.

Quote: what exactly will the spring cleaning conist of?

I am going to run a maintenance script that will delete all inactive members (never made a post and older than a few months).

Quote: can you briefly explain the banner system (standard exchange?) as I missed those conversations.

The banner system is currently in the testing phase. It has currently been discussed by the moderators only. More information will be posted for all to participate on February 1.

P.S. Check your e-mail JP. I have sent you a matter that needs to be dealt with immediately several times now with no response.

Quote: Originally posted by JP Stones
The font is wrong for the design. CLose but not quite right, I would highly recommend playibng with new fonts and caps combinations to get the fell/weright of the log perfect.

Verdana, the current font, certaintly isn't bad, but I think we should try using Arial. It would freshen things up and is just as good, or better.

I don't mind either way. Although I prefer Verdena I would like to see what Arial looks like here too.

I thought that JP was talking about the font I used in the logo. I could see how he thinks it's a little off. I'll try some other options and see what happens. I like the idea of using a more casual, rounded font though, to symbolize the human element of the forums.

As for adding more depth to the logo, I'm not sure how I would do that. I guess I could try some things and see what happens. I made the logo in Fireworks which I'm not too familiar with.