What Do You Think Of The New Weblog Look?

View Comments

• Oooooh. Yeah, I left that up to Dr Jerz to do. If you still want to find them, right now some are still on the "old view" of the page (http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog_old/index.jsp), and then the rest are at the older links page from that (http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog_old/archive/reciprocal.htm)

• The old blog links. I don't see all of them even when I click "View All".

• I also meant the blogroll, plus the menus...what's missing?

• I meant the blogroll.

• Neha - which links aren't there any more? I deliberately left them all there, if any are missing I will put them back. Are you sure they aren't just under the red-colored menus at the top?

• Will, the colours do clash on the sidebar, and barring this computer that I'm writing from, every other that I've been on shows the blue as purple.
   Going back to the sidebar, you're right. It does look much better (less "busier" say) but some of the old links aren't there anymore. I suppose Dr. Jerz would have wanted some of those removed, but it was a nice collection. Maybe if they got rearranged alphabetically?

• Will, I'd say this has been a successful exercise, wouldn't you think? The colors should be easy to change... the content of the navigation bars need some work, but that's just something I've been too busy to look into.
   
   Will, I'd like to thank you -- once again -- for all your hard work on the site. For those who are following along, Will has been working on this project long after the independent study we arranged had expired...
   
   And now a few line break tests
   ...to see how the additions work...
   !

• I appreciate all the comments!
   
   I also appreciate the comments about it looking a lot neater. I thought the old layout was waaay to "busy" - I spent a lot of time trying to fix that. I do appreciate both positive and negative feedback - I think it's a lot better, but certainly not perfect.
   
   As for the clash between the reds, yellow, and blues - I agree it kinda clashes. I left the reds on there so the menu items could be used on the rest of the site, which is still themed red - any ideas on changing this Dr Jerz?
   
   If you want to see how I would ideally like to have it look, cover up the red menus on your monitor, but leave the links area. I think it looks really nice. At least, on my monitor...
   
   Which brings me to the reason why I used light purple. I didn't use light purple. I used light blue. BUT although it shows up as light blue on my monitor, it shows up as light purple on other peoples monitors - which, I agree, looks odd. It's something to do with the brightness and contrast settings. That's why. Perhaps I could try making the color a bit more gray...
   
   Mike, I switched around the menus because I felt they were really unclear - there were menus, then stuck in the middle were links, then there were more menus. Now all the site menus are grouped, and the links are grouped seperately from the menus. So yes, it was a deliberate move. I think the menus could changed to better reflect site navigation, but I just don't have the time to do it right now, so I'm hoping Dr Jerz will. I don't understand what you mean by "redunancy in what's up top and on bottom".
   
   Rosemary, I can understand your the-colors-changed shock, I've had the same thing happen to me. Several people have commented on the yellow clashing with the blue - it's even worse with the menus open. From a usability standpoint, I like the menus being closed. Open they would take up a lot of space, space which could be better used for weblog content. I seriously doubt most people even saw the menus in the previous layout because they were so far down the left-hand side of the page. Everything is a trade-off - would you rather have them quick and easily see the menu items, or the weblog links?
   
   Chris, I agree with your sentiment about not being able to tell which links span several lines. I'll think about how this could be displayed better. The problem is that if you add in bullets, I think it adds more texture to the links area, which draws the readers eyes over there first. I'm trying to get the main content - the entries - to be the first or second (after D.G. Jerz) thing people look at.
   
   Thanks Anonymous Coward, I think the page breaths better to. ;-) The last layout was drowning - help me! help me! it cried out to me. In defense of Dr Jerz's design skills, I still think his original design looked nice (http://localhost:8080/weblog/index.jsp, warning, takes 20 seconds to load). But with his longer entries, two columns wasn't working. And I took white space away in places I probably shouldn't have. :-(
   
   Bobby and MJ, like I mentioned above, I'm sure if you saw it the way it looks on my screen it would look ok to you - I will try and figure out how to fix it. :-)
   
   Thanks Neha. How do you think the sidebar could use some work? Are you referring to the entire side, or just the links section? (the header color does clash a little, a strange side effect of the red, but otherwise...doesn't the links section look nice?)
   
   oldtimey - blue entirely would be preferable, but I wasn't quite ready to ask Dr Jerz to redesign the rest of his site so I could make the menu entries entirely blue. ;-) The idea is that the unfolding menus will eventually be used everywhere else on the site as well (but just for the menus they are used for now). It WOULD be nice if it looked exactly the same in all browsers...(design-wise, it's pretty close, there's just that problem with Safari...)
   
   Thanks Kirsten and Susan - my main goal in redesigning this page was to get rid of the "busy and panicked" look I thought the old one had. I spent a lot of time going "Should I have 10 or 15 pixels of white space?" and doing my best to get rid of the extra "clutter" and lines. :-) The plus symbol to do the expansion, is of course stolen from windows - the ui standard by sheer brute force. The red-blue-gray colors did end up clashing somewhat. It's something to think about...
   
   MisterBS - if the css didn't load for you...Dr Jerz's comment about rebooting (sometimes hitting refresh does the trick) is the best advice I can give you.
   
   Lisa and Yoon - I wish I could do something about the Safari problem, but 1. I don't have access to Safari, so it's really difficult for me to test to find which changes would fix it, and 2. It works EVERYWHERE else - even Mozilla, which is pretty damn standards complient. I wish I could offer something better than "Use Mozilla", but it looks to me like a big in Safari. And without going back to a table based layout, which I got away from so that the content could load before the menu, I'm not sure how to fix it. I'm emailing with Lisa, so maybe I'll figure it out eventually...
   
   Ben - I see Dr Jerz has added white lines to seperate the comments a little more. I agree that the seperation could have been done much better, I just ran out of time. Thanks for your comment though! One possibility is to alternate background colors for each comment - the first is light blue, the second white, the third light blue, the fourth white... I'm not sure what you are referring to by the error in the navbar's Weblog field - it's supposed to be open, and a different color, so they are easy to spot and to signify that this is where you are (ok, that last part didn't work so well. But the blue heading kinda goes with the blue theme of the weblog...) Hmm, I wonder what it would look like with the text left-aligned...(although I have my reserverations).
   
   Oh, and Ben - I just fixed comments so they won't get squished any more - A new line in the comment box now gets turned into a newline (<br/>) in the html, so now no one has to type <p/> or <br/> tags any more! It's a neat idea to add the little plus things on the comments, but I'm hesitant because it adds clutter. And the people I've showed to it find the drop-down comments unexpected, but they don't get confused, they just go "Neat!".
   
   Heather - as I wrote above, I was actually aiming for a light blue. I'm not sure about making it darker - I don't want to make the text hard to read (although if you have a photoshopped sample of a new shade you think looks good, I would love to see it), and readability is more important than making the reader feel a little relaxed. Anyways, with Dr Jerz's hard-hitting commentary, they could probably use some relaxation, right? (haha) Glad to hear you find it neater - #1 motivation for the redesign (neater, less "busy", etc).
   
   Thanks to everyone for their comments - please continue to make comments either on the design, or on my comments to your comments. A web page is always a work in progress.

• You're using a light purple? Why? Can you maybe make the color darker? From an AP class, I attend, I was taught light colors such as these tend to make the reader relaxed, sleepy, and lazy. Do you want a reader so relaxed they go to sleep reading the weblogs, or too lazy to comment? Don't get me wrong, mental relaxation is a good thing. I don't understand why you would want it here though. -1 Our comp. class voted that if you could make the background a little darker it might work better for you and the readers. +2 on the left bar. We all agree that looks much neater than before. Other than the possible color shade change we find everything else great as always.

• Yikes, reloading and I get it now. I think the color scheme doesn't match, but even worse, the navbar renders on top of the main column of text, rendering it all but unreadable (or at least, really annoying). Again, I'm betting this is an issue with the older version of Safari I use, but it does mean I'll have to switch browsers to read this site.