The Official New Layout Topic

archard

Joined: Jan 11 2007

Thank you. I actually payed someone to do that, considering I have no graphic design skills whatsoever Turned out pretty good I think.

yoshistrings

ヨッシー

Location: trapped in an egg

Joined: Oct 29 2007

thank goodness. I was about to go crazy looking at the old layout every day.

Zero

The Red Mega Man

Location: Right behind you

Joined: Oct 05 2007

I likes it! It kinda just blew up in my face when the page loaded and I was like " Freaking Awesome!"

archard

Joined: Jan 11 2007

Thanks for the feedback guys. What do you think about the new forum skin? I wasn't really feeling the old one so I decided to go for a completely different look.

archard

Joined: Jan 11 2007

"MetalMario702" posted:

hey man, just gonna be honest, im not really liking it that much... The new logo and the navigation (including a tabs button) arent so bad, but the theme just doesnt feel right. the colors dont seem to flow as well. call me old fashioned, but it feels alot more amateur to me...

The new forum with more smilies and colors is nice though =D

I guess you're not being sarcastic

Well I appreciate the negative feedback because I never like it when I only get positive feedback. Could you be a little more specific about what you don't like? Out of all the things you could say, the new layout being more amateur than the old one kinda blows my mind. To me it's the exact opposite. I never liked the old layout because to me it just looked like it was kinda thrown together sloppily (which is true).

Rick

Unusual

Joined: Apr 17 2007

Yeah, the green font and pale sides are weird, in all honesty

The logo is cool, the way Game Tabs is written feels like Game Tabs

I like the home button and all those

The Tabs IS easy to use/navigate, it just seems so hidden (as already stated)

But everything else is cool

MetalMario702

The Mario of Metal

Location: Rhode Island

Joined: Oct 27 2007

like i said the colors are one of the main things. if you decide to stick with a color i would suggest the green-ish on the side menu, the black and light/dark blue dont really seem to fit the feel of the site to me. the tabs drop--down menu on the navigation is kinda glitchy for me im not sure if its cause im using opera or not.

the logo and forum style are nice though

archard

Joined: Jan 11 2007

"MetalMario702" posted:

like i said the colors are one of the main things. if you decide to stick with a color i would suggest the green-ish on the side menu, the black and light/dark blue dont really seem to fit the feel of the site to me. the tabs drop--down menu on the navigation is kinda glitchy for me im not sure if its cause im using opera or not.

the logo and forum style are nice though

Wait so your problem is with the color scheme yet you like the colors???

Joined: Dec 31 1969

The logo at the top is the background image. @_@

Joined: Dec 31 1969

is just the background image for the part at the top. There's no foreground up there.

Joined: Dec 31 1969

Oh, wow. I was wondering what all the spaces up there were for.

Fine, I'll keep Adblock Plus disabled for http://gametabs.net.

archard

Joined: Jan 11 2007

"Zelos" posted:

I already told you that I would prefer this new design in blue...so I'll be waiting for an option to choose from green and blue.
Other than that some small bug:
Two of my recordings show the same video two times (the upper two). I don't know why though.

Yeah I know why it's doing that, kinda hard to explain but I just have to go in there and manually fix them.

I'm thinking about coming up with a new color scheme. Same design, just with blue colors basically. Green is probably the hardest color scheme to pull off when it comes to web designs. And I kinda miss the blue too.

jlong22

Joined: Oct 11 2007

You probably already know about this, unless it's browser specific, but just pointing out that in Safari, the logo is aligned to the right of the header on all pages of the site except the forums. This pushes the google ads down underneath the navigation bar and covers up the top of the content area.

If this is in Safari only and you can't see this, let me know and I can get a screenshot for you if you want. Also, I mentioned this in the comments of the news post but I am very good with php and also fairly decent with graphics so I can help out with anything site-related if you want I'd like to give back a little to the site since I've gotten so much out of it.

archard

Joined: Jan 11 2007

Also, I have somewhat PHP related question. It's more general computer science though. Do you know how to use a base 36 digit number system? In particular, the 'vancode' system? There's a problem with how some of the comments are displaying right now and I need to figure out this base 36 system in order to fix it.

jlong22

Joined: Oct 11 2007

Here's the screenshot:

http://www.mitsenf.com/header.png

edit: whoops, linked it cause it's a little too big for the forums.

Unfortunately I've never really worked with anything other than base-10. I understand the concept of a base-36 system so I might be able to figure out what's wrong by looking at the code but I'm afraid I wouldn't be able to give much advice. What's the display issue? It seems strange that you should have to use a base-36 system to fix something like that.

Joined: Dec 31 1969

Base-36? I'm assuming that's 10 digits + 26 letters, but that sounds confusing. Anything past base-16 goes over my head.

archard

Joined: Jan 11 2007

So I've been thinking about all the feedback I've gathered and I've been talking to some of my graphic design inclined friends about the layout and I've decided to change a few things around. Nothing major, the basic look and feel will remain the same, but there will be some significant changes.

First, I'm gonna move both sidebars to the right side of the page. I've been experimenting with this and it really helps shift the focus in the correct areas. Right now I feel like information is a little too busy and scattered. Moving the sidebars to the right and all the content to the left helps keep things a lot more organized.

Second, I'm gonna get rid the blue background. According to one of my friends the layout has no "flow", and I don't think you can really identify a true "theme" from this layout. So the color scheme is gonna stay green, but move to more of a true, well defined green that "flows". I'm also gonna eliminate a lot of the borders. The forum theme will also change to match the layout of the main site better.

I think this will satisfy both people who like the green (which is the majority) and those who didn't like it as much. This new scheme I have in mind is much less in your face and flows much better. I've also been thinking about having multiple color schemes and letting people switch between them. But that will be later down the line.

Tell me what you think.

TrangOul

Insomaniac

Location: Germany

Joined: Feb 24 2008

In my opinion the new style's weakness lies within this forum. I can't exactly describe why, but it feels awkward to browse through it.
Furthermore the shoutbox does not work (at least for me it doesn't)and there's no Search button, just the Google Search plugin for the whole site.

Joined: Dec 31 1969

archard said

Well I just spent 3 agonizing hours putting this new layout up. I say agonizing because I ran into to so many issues during the process that I have just about lost the will to live. I know there's a lot of things I still need to fix, and I'll do that after a good night's sleep.

I hope you all like the layout, please leave comments and suggestions in this topic.

It's a great job!