New Look -- feedback

Pleasant surprise when I logged on today (via PC versus an HPC).

Nice job.


jt

I have mixed feelings about it. The one thing I don't understand is why many of the main site links are duplicated: first in the upper-right corner, then again on the left side down a bit further. Also, the visited links colors are not as easy to read with the dark background. I don't understand what was wrong with the previous CSS styling as it was easier to read and seemed to fit more with the style of the website.

Thanks hmascience. It's not going to gel with everyone, and I do understand that.

The short answer for mscdex is that hpcfactor is costing too much money to run and I need to reduce the server load and bandwidth level otherwise I'll be forced to pull the plug.

The VS-v2 template was taking in excess of 26 round trips to load the UI, VS-v25 takes 4. The 2.5 interface is a back port of what at one time (long ago) was the prototype for hpcfactor v3. I needed something put together quickly to do as I do not have the time to focus on the site at the moment, and there never will be a V3.

You think I'm being bandwidth picky for a few images etc? The daily transaction log for Thalassa has between 1/6 and 1/3 smaller every day since the template was implmented on most of the site. In the last month I've pulled an average of over 30GB off of that servers IO bandwidth. It will also speed up browsing on any platform.

The UI change has come with a my new asp theme engine which is a whole heap more efficient and more powerful than what we have been using to date. The only down side is that it discriminates against browsers with poor CSS support - sorry guys, you knew it was coming.

Now, if we ignore the little hick who decided to download every image, link and path on the domain this morning, trebbled our mean traffic (thanks for that... you're precious... you really are), got caught by insurgent and got IP blocked. I think the numbers speak for itself.

For those who only just noticed, it was installed over 4 weeks ago in some site areas, 2 weeks ago on the main site (all of it), on the FP today and will be installed on the forum at my next convenience.

As for your dislike of the UI mscdex, fair enough. But don't be the guy with grumbles, be the guy with suggestions.

Ok, well my suggestion would be to modify the CSS of the current theme to use the color scheme as the previous one: green headers with white text and a content panel background color of white with the dark green color for updated/non-visited links and the lighter green for visited links (I think that was how the links were styled anyway). It doesn't have to be that same color scheme, just something that's more readable (and/or fits in with the site's mostly green and white theme). If I'm the only one who thinks the readability is a concern, I'll end it here.

Edit: Another suggestion is perhaps enabling on-the-fly gzip compression for client requests that accept gzip. If there are multiple javascript, CSS, or other files for some pages, combining them (plus compressed on the fly using gzip) would also help decrease the size of and the number of trips to the server. You may have already thought about it, but I just thought I'd throw it out there. I use mod_deflate (IIRC) on my Apache systems along with (PHP in my case) scripts that automatically combine JS files into one, and CSS files into one, both are compressed (meaning extra spaces and newlines are removed, JS is minified, then both are gzipped), the results are cached, and future requests use the cached version.

Edited by mscdex 2009-10-07 3:08 PM

There is an issue that a few people have had over the years with the green in that they can't see it
Migrating from green on the smaller link text was primarily because if you're going to be colour blind, it's more likely that you're green blind.

Keep the discussion going, it's your site, you tell me what you want.

Edit: Thalassa has been sending data compressed content where it can for the last 3.5 years.

It loads much faster on my measly gprs connection, so i would have to give it a thumbs up.

Oh, I like it. Fonts are crisp, good use of bold. Were I you, I might bump the font size up a point or two, but I assume that you've already played with this extensively and settled on the current size for many reasons.

Well done,
Jake

The fonts are as they are mainly for cosmetic reasons more than anything else (particuarly on smaller screens). Everything should scale properly though, so using the browser to bump the CSS up a point or two should make a universal change (*bites fingernails*).

Why doesn't the 'Your settings' link work and where can I see my private messages?

Cheers
SainT

I'm getting there, the forum UI port isn't finished yet, I keep getting distracted by people posting odd things today

IF ANYONE FINDS BUGS PLEASE REPORT THEM HERE:
http://www.hpcfactor.com/forums/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=11325

Hey Chris

I like the new streamed down look......if it lowers the cost and allows the site to keep operating, then I'm all for it.


Thanks for all the time and effort you have put in to keep this thing going.

Thanks John, nice to see you around, we haven't seen you for quite a while

Yeah, John, you gotta start posting again - you're only 41 posts away from 1337.

I guess I'll just have to get used to this look it's perfectly OK for the purposes stated above