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I like it !
It just looks wrong with the menu on the left hand side.
I'll echo that sentiment. I'm so used to having my cursor sitting either at the center or to the right of the document. Not at the left hand side of the page. I'm right handed. That's a left handed menu. ;)
I understand the reasoning, all the threads and posts here about all those statistics indicating "where people expect things to be," in that upper left area of the viewport, I see this as finally knuckling in to what's probably some of the recommendations here.
I always saw the home page of this site as a testimonial that "what you hear is not always 100% true," that it worked fine and put what was intended to be first more toward the hot area: the featured discussions.
This was the rebel site, the one that works in spite of the recommendations, now it no longer is.
But that's OK, we'll get used to it and all will be fine. :-P
Same bat time, same bat channel ;-)
Also preferred topic list on the right. I'll let you know in a week.
At normal size it looks pretty ok... I am still in the right hand side nav camp though.
As for the rest; am I experiencing mirror vision? It'll take some getting used to, but it's not bad!
Have people submit stylesheets for the current layout and see what they do with it.
Not that it is ugly but it is amazing where some people go with design.
has anybody ever implemented a design update that was universally accepted by the long time users?
Nope, at least I haven't. Humans are creatures of habit, change is never easy to implement. No matter how much better the new one is people who are "used to" the old one will cling to it until the new one becomes ingrained into them.
I would wager that if you gave a new skin enough time and then reverted back to an older design the same people that hated the new one would hate hate the old one even more.
I'm on Firefox/Ubuntu, which the homepage looks awful on anyway, so maybe it just my machine.
I moved from phpbb to vb on a large forum once. I hope never to have to go through that again. this font's too big. that font's to small. I used to be able to see this, now I see something else.
Not saying the concerns aren't valid. Just sayin.....I hate being webmaster for those kinds of changes.
My comment:
It does feel a bit wierd with the new layout, even only coming here for less than 2 months I got used to it on the right. Still, I personally like left-aligned sky scrapers, and I have no complaint about distance from the scroll bar, as I'm strongly in the habit of using my mousewheel to scroll :)
As I said in a different thread, it's been a long time since I noticed a site whose markup still uses the center element, and the whole site uses tables for layout.
I don't think it would take much to produce the same look the site has now, but switch out the markup for semantic HTML and CSS. (But I'm always an optimist at the start of a project that I've suggested.)
would wager that if you gave a new skin enough time and then reverted back to an older design the same people that hated the new one would hate hate the old one even more.
You should have been around the first time when I moved the Index page [webmasterworld.com] off of the home page and went to the current slashdot inspired style.
I think everyone is suffering from flipped house syndrome. We all walked in and found the furniture, door, windows and rooms reversed. It would take anyone time to get use to it.
First, because I am not used to it (that will be gone over the next few days).
Second, because I am using a 16:9 widescreen with 1920x1080 pixels, and the sub-headlines are now looooooong lines of text where in the past it would be more like several lines in a paragraph.
Why fix it when it is not broken?
I preferred the right aligned menus. It is a design element I have used on other sites as well.
Wwwwiiiiide screens simply make it more relevant to have the menu close to the scroll bar - mouse wheel or not.
After reading a bit about some of the underlying reasons (security and otherwise) I understand. I'm strapped in and ready. Go for it Brett.
How many visitors enter the site via the home page?
Small numbers enter the site that way. However, almost all of the daily repeat members visit the homepage atleast once a day. They watch for homepage additions and changes.
Some use it to replace the forum index page: [webmasterworld.com...]
If I click on forums index I get this
http://www.webmasterworld.com/home.htm
If I click on the logo I get this
http://www.webmasterworld.com/
Is the home page the one that says home.htm?
[webmasterworld.com...]
See, the home page actually used to be the forums index page. We switched that about 2002 to the current slashdot style of highlighted thread homepage. We went through much gnashing at that change as well.
Let me just say - this is the first of some long over due changes to the homepage.
the proper response for that HTTP Request is:
301 Moved Permanently
Location:http://www.webmasterworld.com/
Having the nav on the left is bad news. My eyes go to that part of the page expecting content, only to hit the nav.
I'm sure there were good reasons for putting it there, but I personally liked it much better on the right-hand side.
