New website/forum style

Roscoe · by **Roscoe** » 25 May 2006, 19:25

My screen is 1024 across. By restricting your display to 800 it means more scrolling and wasted space on the right.

Personally I liked the old way better...

boff180 · by **boff180** » 25 May 2006, 19:41

I'm sure there is someway of auto-clipping the forum width to the browser window/resolution.

That I think would be better, I have a high resolution for one reason, more stuff on the screen at once... and a having to scroll alot defeats that

Anyway, keep up the great work lads!

Andy

RyanCollins · by **RyanCollins** » 25 May 2006, 19:48

Congratulations by the new design! Sincerely the page looks brilliant with this new format! Congrats to the F-16.net team and Peter, you guys made an excellent work.

:cheers:

AfterburnerDecalsScott · by **AfterburnerDecalsScott** » 25 May 2006, 20:02

I really like it a lot.....the new banner is awesome.

ET-204 · by **ET-204** » 25 May 2006, 21:55

Well, I think it's a cool design!

/ ET-204

Person · by **Person** » 25 May 2006, 22:10

Roscoe wrote:My screen is 1024 across. By restricting your display to 800 it means more scrolling and wasted space on the right.

Personally I liked the old way better...

The new banner and color scheme look great! But I agree with Roscoe and the others. The squished text on the left 1/3 of the screen is hard on the eyes.

I run Firefox: 1152 x 864 @ work and 1600 x 1200 @ home.

Jon · by **Jon** » 25 May 2006, 22:11

Hi All

Looks like most of the feedback is positive. As an editor, I've had this new format for a while. I didn't like it as much at first, but now I find it better. So anyone who isn't used to it, just give it a little time like I did. It looks great but was different.

Good job Stefaan, Lieven and Bjorn

Cheers,
Jon

Redtail115 · by **Redtail115** » 25 May 2006, 23:22

when on a screen bigger than 1024x768 (I'm on 1280x1024) the website is ONLY using the left two thirds of my browser.

This is fine for the website but for the forums, its squashing the threads up and making them even longer I'm afraid!

Ditto,

But, the site looks great, real clean! I especially like the new logo and graphics. :thumb:

Thanks guys!

Person · by **Person** » 25 May 2006, 23:56

Jon wrote:Hi All

Looks like most of the feedback is positive. As an editor, I've had this new format for a while. I didn't like it as much at first, but now I find it better. So anyone who isn't used to it, just give it a little time like I did. It looks great but was different.

Good job Stefaan, Lieven and Bjorn

Cheers,
Jon

Curious to why you think it's better? From a web design standpoint anywhere from half to 1/3 the page is being wasted with white space. And then it smashes all the text into a portion of the screen. Also the forum text doesn't align with the banner width for instance.

I saw the newspaper comment. But this isn't a newspaper and newspapers put things in tiny columns to get the most amount of articles on one page given the limited space they are working with. They don't make books into tiny columns for instance. Fixing it at 800 pixels wide was a wise choice in 1998 but now?

Guysmiley · by **Guysmiley** » 26 May 2006, 04:23

Curious to why you think it's better?

IMO the look and color scheme is more visually appealing, as well as the toolbar layout on the left side. And of course the great banner!

Like I said, the ONLY thing that I think is a step backwards is the fixed width forums. Can't do proportional widths?

F16VIPER · by **F16VIPER** » 26 May 2006, 04:50

Guys:
Thanks for your efforts in trying to please us all F-16 lovers.

I may be alone on this one, but I find the opening page far too crowded and difficult to read.

Graphically I believe it is better to have a page with 3 columns or maybe just 2.
New forum entries could go on top of news. Just a thought. 4 columns makes it a bit crowded. All the computers I have access too are running at very high resolution so it is a bit difficult to read.

Thanks again for such a great site.

regards

F16VIPER

DeepSpace · by **DeepSpace** » 26 May 2006, 05:43

It looks great! One glitch I found is the Photo Gallery. It's dead :wink:

.

Stefaan · by **Stefaan** » 26 May 2006, 08:45

Person wrote:Curious to why you think it's better? From a web design standpoint anywhere from half to 1/3 the page is being wasted with white space. And then it smashes all the text into a portion of the screen. Also the forum text doesn't align with the banner width for instance.

I saw the newspaper comment. But this isn't a newspaper and newspapers put things in tiny columns to get the most amount of articles on one page given the limited space they are working with. They don't make books into tiny columns for instance. Fixing it at 800 pixels wide was a wise choice in 1998 but now?

I didn't say it was better from a DESIGN point of view - but it's better from a usability point of view. Short lines are easier to read (that's the general consensus and there's a bunch of research that confirms it). It's the same reason why many sites with lots of text use short lines. See for example:

CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/internet/0 ... index.html
BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/

We'll look into a more fluid design though , so you can make the forum as wide as you want to - only makes sense to give everyone the choice :-)

stefaan

Stefaan · by **Stefaan** » 26 May 2006, 08:47

DeepSpace wrote:It looks great! One glitch I found is the Photo Gallery. It's dead .

Yeah it sometimes does that - it's a serious bug in the software. It requires a manual restart to get it going again.

Sorry for the inconvenience - I hope one of the next releases of the software will fix that problem.

stefaan

RoAF · by **RoAF** » 26 May 2006, 14:49

Stefaan wrote:

To answer Andy's question about the text width in the forum: We chose indeed to limit the text width to 800pixels, for two reasons:

1. main reason is to make it easier to read. There's a lot of research available that confirms short text lines are easier to read, and optimum text width is less than 800pixels (if you print an 800 pixel page, you'd fill a standard A4 or Letter page, so no coincidence there)

For me it's not easier to read the texts when I've got half of the screen BRIGHT WHITE. I have to use a 21' monitor both at work and at home because of my job - CAD.
In my opinion going back to 800 is a step back now when everybody starts dumping old 15' and even 17' screens - it's just not an improvement.
Sorry guys, I know you're working hard for this site but I had to say it!