What do you think?

[Ed]

Something like 100 people per day are visiting the community for the past few days. It would be great to get some feedback on the changes to the main page:

https://community.nakedexperiment.com/

Are they better? Is the site easier to navigate? Does it give a better idea of the amount of activity going on here?

I’d love to hear from mobile phone users in particular.

 

[Ed]

I’m beginning to worry that everyone is being polite and just not saying anything because everyone hates the new layout of the main page.

[Anonymous]

The new layout is pretty simple to use

I like the changes but in all honesty I still scroll the screen to the bottom if the top link hasn’t changed on the latest activity.  The activity at the bottom of the page has the time it was last updated and is probably a bit more useful than the bit at the top. As nice as the top changes are they have helped a few times but I do still find myself scrolling to see when something was updated.
<p style=”text-align: left;”>In terms of look and feel the new boxes look nice and smooth, much more up to date and much more like a modern website but I think. The top two boxes are probably in the wrong order feels like links to content should be above latest activity.  I’d probably still just scroll to get more info most of the time though.</p>
 

I’m not sure if there is anything you can do about it but there also seems to be quite a bit of lag when replying to a message. When inhit submit it can take 5 or 6 seconds to actually submit and take me back to show the submitted message. Not the end of the world I’m still here months later but its not the easiest site to interact with sometimes.

Ed likes this

[Ed]

If I change the order of the two new boxes then the shortcuts box won’t line up with the right column, which would look weird.

If I add the freshness display to the Latest Updates box, it would reduce it to 3 updates (from 6).

I’m not sure I understand your comment about the appearance of the new boxes as they are exactly the same rounding and shadows as all the other boxes as they all use the same theme script. Sorry if I’m missing the point.

The difficult part is making a layout which works on both normal screens AND mobiles. I’m not good at judging websites on mobiles as I have yet to find one which isn’t complete sh*t on such a small screen.

Thanks for the feedback. 🙂

[Anonymous]

When you said right column ongot confused until I turned my phone round. I always use it in portrait mode as typing anything is impossible in landscape, the keyboard just covered everything.

 

The new boxes don’t really show as boxes on my screen they show as like a banner across the whole page. When compared to the other boxeslower than under the content which are smaller and look like boxes.

If I’m the only mobile user then don’t add changes just for me.

Stuff works and I can easily find what I want.

You can see what my screen looks like on the attachments

 

When I say the order of the top 2 boxes its because in portrait mode the activity box is on top of the links when I turned the phone sideways your comment makes perfect sense.

Ed likes this

[Ed]

Those boxes not showing as boxes is because mobile webbrowsers still seem to assume that all screens are 3-4 inches rather than the more modern 6-7 inches. If the browser didn’t magnify stuff so much, you would see the sides of the box.

It’s difficult because the world changes and sites have to change with it, but sites aren’t always suited to new trends and changing often isn’t easy. Obviously, I run this community as a hobby so I can’t easily do large-scale changes – I just don’t have the time. Also, rebuilds that would temporarily take out the site are a problem as that sort of work could mean no site for a week or two, which (based on prior experience) would lose us half of our regular visitors and set us back years. After finding a non-functioning site for a few days, people soon forget to keep checking.

 

Matt likes this

[Ed]

Has anyone else got any opinions on the new layout?

[Ed]

Can anyone spot the latest change?

[Ed]

No-one?

[ptHarry]

Don’t think I saw this before yesterday

 

Attachments:

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[Ed]

That came when I installed the Patreon integration a few days ago. To be honest, I don’t actually know what it does as I don’t see how Patreon can know which account here is yours. There is much to learn!

 

I added a shortcut panel near the top of the right menu, allowing you to filter the different categories of posts in the blog. The blog is now much more the centre of the site.

[Ed]

The categories panel is now integrated into the title panel (which I think looks a LOT better). I’d love to integrate the menu panel too but it’s a little too large.

For the past couple of days, I’ve been adding (or in some cases re-adding) lots of content to the blog. There’s a lot more to go, so I’ll attempt to add a few every day until they are all there. Safe to say, there’s already a LOT more content in the blog than there was before.

Hopefully, I’ll get the structural changes to the forums done over this weekend.

[Ed]

It would be great to get more feedback on the layout improvements from more people.

I’ve got a plan to reduce the 6 main forums down to just 3, but it’s a big job to achieve and I’m not sure if the “benefits” are worth it.

[Author]

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