New design, new era. TPCS v11

Look at the width, Winston! Look at the width!
By Oli on Friday, 31st August 2007. More information. Comments.

Now with an added 245px width in the content section. Lovely or too fat for your liking? Please tell me what you think and help me fix any issues.

Steve started redesigning Seopher.com and like a menstrual cycle, the idea caught on here and I thought I'd play around with a few ideas. Very quickly a few ideas turned into a raging clue and that's where we are now.

The earth. Thinner than this design.

The content section is now officially wider than the circumference of the Earth. That said, the overall layout has lost nearly 100px due to me dropping the sidebar. I had my reasons though.

I want things to be as readable as they possibly could be. Now, I know a lot of that has to do with my not typing like a spazz but what service does it do your readers to have other content advertising its arse off right next to the content the visitor is actually trying to read? None. You just distract people and they don't get the most from your content.

I followed this theme though and culled the header down to a puny 85px (from 115px). Some clutter had to be moved away into the footer and in order to help that, I also gave the footer a thorough spanking.

There's still a buttload of work to do. Wide format can't be used for everything. The article and blog listing pages just look weird as there's too much space so I'll be playing around with all of that soon enough. If you've got any ideas for any of that stuff, I'd love to hear them.

Anyway... What do you think to it? Too wide?

Grav

Written by Oli on Friday, 31 August 2007. Tagged with design, news. Read 1135 times. If you liked it, please give it a digg.

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#1 — Author comment /* 12 months, 3 days ago */
And yes, I know Opera is being wholly uncooperative at the moment. HTML is valid. CSS is valid. Opera is an invalid. *sighs*
#2 /* 12 months, 3 days ago */
Love the new design Oli! It looks fantastic!
#3 /* 12 months, 3 days ago */
Well I've been along for the ride long enough now so I've seen this stuff evolve.

There's been some mixed responses around the office about this one; I quite like it and it gives me more of a clue than my latest design does...
<a href="http://www.seopher.com" target="_blank">Seopher.com</a>
#4 /* 12 months, 3 days ago */
It looks really good. I actually feel more comfortable reading narrower columns, ie. not having to move my eyes constantly from side to side. But that may be just me, and other than that I think it looks and feels great.
#5 — Author comment /* 12 months, 3 days ago */
hthth I know exactly what you mean. I think I've still got some work to do balancing the font-size and the line-height because it is quite easy to get "lost" when reading across a long line. I'm tempted to bring it in 40-100px before I get too dependant on having 800px to play with.

I've also got to decide whether I continue the chunky-border theme (as seen on the comments) and port it to other page elements or ditch it. It's pretty inconsistent as is.
#6 /* 12 months, 2 days ago */
Looks good. The only thing I'd suggest changing is the font sizes in the footer. I can barely read them, not because of them being small, but they're getting badly pixelated/jaggy.

Screens in safari and firefox on osx:

http://www.makesitgood.net/footer_ff.png
http://www.makesitgood.net/footer_safari.png
#7 — Author comment /* 12 months, 2 days ago */
Yeah I cranked that down because Steve's (Seopher's) entry in the "Latest Elsewhere" section was taking up two lines and making things look a mess. I'm looking into how to avoid that happening now so I can bring the size back up. I've got a lot of that sort of stuff to do around the site. =\
#8 /* 12 months, 1 day ago */
Curse you! With the forum gone, my signature isn't funny any more! Now I'll have to think up a new sig.

Seriously, though, bring back the forums if possible. I was hoping I could use them whenever I needed to pose technical questions to a smart crowd (even if said crowd is only you and maybe Seopher).
Cross me and be thagomized.
#9 — Author comment /* 12 months, 1 day ago */
I'm not sure if it's staying that way or not. At the very least, it needed a thorough redesign and probably a couple of small changed in how it worked. I'll resurrect it when I can.
#10 /* 12 months, 1 day ago */
Looks great now, the footer is stylin now that it's legible.
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