Design

I've been looking at the great design of all the site and have determined that they suck. It is time for a refresh. Anyone want to throw some ideas out on how to improve the layout? It needs to be simple, no flashy images and such. Think for low bandwidth people. I have some ideas in mind and I'll show them when I get home. I'll be making some new test styles to try it out.

I like it the way it is loads fast and I am on dial up.

But I'm sure I can come up with something...

I'm doing the redesign now. It is looking good. I'm forced to use tables for layout in a few area , but the majority will be using pure CSS and divs. By all means send in a design and I can make it into a theme. That would be awesome.

Here is a taste of the new style in its XHTML goodness. The attachment below. I will update the theme on here (under XHTML Test) soon. Question: I have a floating DIV on the left to do the left bar and I set the page content to a margin of 145px on the left to not spill under the left bar. If I have a floated image in the content area and I do a clear:both;, the content appears under the left bar even though that's not the float I wanted to clear. It is hard to explain, I'll show you when I get home.

Said By Aron Schatz

I've been looking at the great design of all the site and have determined that they suck. It is time for a refresh. Anyone want to throw some ideas out on how to improve the layout? It needs to be simple, no flashy images and such. Think for low bandwidth people. I have some ideas in mind and I'll show them when I get home. I'll be making some new test styles to try it out.

A question: Is it normal for the font to be Times New Roman in the forums? I find it a bit unusual, most forums would use MS sans serif or Arial. I'm using Firefox BTW if that matters.

Thankfully, this is not most forums. Yes, the font used is Times New Roman. I like that font, but the redesign will use mostly sans-serify fonts.

Nothing really wrong with Times, just found it unusual since the forum index page used a sans-serif font. Just thought that something wasn't right since Times is often used as the "default" font if a particular font couldn't be found

Here is another taste. When I can work on it more tomorrow, I'll upload the latest theme. I'm trying to rework some ASEcode things first.

I like the design right now because it's fast and very functional.

Different color schemes would be nice, maybe more white, orange, and green, instead of black, grey and dark/glowing blue?

Don't have any problems with this design though, thats for sure.

The new design looks nice and is well organized; I also like the variety of fonts used

Here is another taste. I just finished the comments. There are NO tables for the comments. That's pure divs and spans with a bunch of CSS. This also means the viewtopic for the forum will be completed with little effort (since comments and messages are the same layout).

The new design is very extensible. By just changing the CSS you can redo the entire layout and design of the site. I'm making it this way because that's how it should have been in the first place. While I'm redoing the design, I'm also going through the code and cleaning up stuff. Consider this version 3.1.

The XHTML Test theme has been updated. You can check out where the design is heading.

Things that 'work':
Only on main site:
Index
Articles
News
Comments (mostly)

That's basically it. The redesign is very tough. Test it out and let me know what you think.

Said By Aron Schatz

Test it out and let me know what you think.

URI ?

User CP Under themes.... XHTML Test.

WOW, I checked out the new design, its really nice. Not much of a change really, but nicer shades, I like the fade from blue to black in the menu bar.

If you look at the underlying X/HTML between the themes, you'll see there is a huge difference.

Most of the site on the XHTML Test is tableless (most).

Edit: The damn site looks horrible in IE6 on WinXP. Somethings aren't even rendering text correctly. I'll have to investigate these issues before proceeding further. Looks like I need to open up a Virtual PC session and start testing multiple OSes and multiple browsers. I've been checking Firefox and IE5.5. IE5.5 gets some things wrong but the site was usuable. In IE6 it sucks.