Front Page Layout

bug

Mrs McGee wrote: »

There seems to be a lot of posters, who quite possibly are female who like the clouds. It probably matches their curtains.

Might as well just go for a Powder Puff Girls skin.

:pac:

.

Clouds are universally calming.

I like the clouds and I have curtains, and they don't match them.

The top menu is a bit bogus looking. Its "dropping" into the background.

And the "pog" looking images on the top right; suscribers, forum posts, blog posts, wiki wiki, web don't work on the blue background or the resolution of the pics is wrong. I don't know what the problem is.

Either way they look like the've been cut out with a rough edged scissors and stuck on.

Other than that its grand.

And I like the clouds, very Spoilt Child as someone else said and I love their designs.

Rancidmaniac13

I think the right column is far too big. Looks very off when scaled down.

Daithi McGee

bug wrote: »

Clouds are universally calming.

I like the clouds and I have curtains, and they don't match them.

The top menu is a bit bogus looking. Its "dropping" into the background.

And the "pog" looking images on the top right; suscribers, forum posts, blog posts, wiki wiki, web don't work on the blue background or the resolution of the pics is wrong. I don't know what the problem is.

Either way they look like the've been cut out with a rough edged scissors and stuck on.

Other than that its grand.

And I like the clouds, very Spoilt Child as someone else said and I love their designs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Podgpel8_h4

copacetic

Apart from the annoying missing poster information the really big issue for me after a day of the new look is that the new front page is a lot slower to load. It has made going direct to boards.ie unusable from my phone and significantly slowed down the access from my PC via mobile broadband. I haven't got the quickest connection but have gone from 2-3 seconds to 10-15 seconds which is obviously very annoying.

Have had to save off internal links so will be avoiding the front page altogether from now on. It will be straight to usercp and newposts search for me. Front page was the only one I saw ads on too. Would imagine a lot of people will bypass the front page, or maybe they won't bother and just get pee'd off with the speed at which it loads now. Or maybe we will all upgrade to proper broadband speeds.

randylonghorn

Bit cluttered, I would like to see the last poster column restored, and the google ads on the right look very out of place, imho, mainly because the background doesn't match.

Sorry to be so negative!

I do like the top with the clouds background though.

Adyx

I don't spend a lot amount of time on the front page so it's not a huge deal but it looks ridiculous on an ASUS eeePC because of Google Search and ads.

Boards1.JPG

Boards2.JPG

Tar.Aldarion

Looks good. Niggle; spacing is bad between forum, thread title and post date. Too much blank space yet. I think 'post date' should be changed to 'post time' and the date removed, the space not yet used going to poster name.

Sherifu

I like it, could just be because it's finally something different though

Malteaser!

I like it.

Only problem I'd have with it, like others have mentioned before, is that you can't see who the last poster was. It's no big deal but I liked having it there.

Villain

Bring back the last poster line!

Vain

Why does mine say boards.ie mobile at the top?

Vain

If I use my normal browser it runs on the mobile boards site. if i run it on google chrome its on the normal boards .. weird

Vexorg

The day as usual is not turning out as planned so tweaking the page may not happen today.

IMHO - the most important issue, the page should not be taking much longer to load - this will have to be looked at - for me it loads faster than index-old.

Next the "Last Poster", I have to admit to being surprised that would be missed, given the sheer volume of posts and the chances you might see a poster of interest rather than a topic of interest, cleearly stalking is importmnat to some people:) We will see how this can be incorporated and if it proves difficult, we can see if it can be enabled through a user control panel option.

V.

Vexorg

In relation to the slow page load can anyone affected by it do a check against www.boards.ie/index-old.php also - a bit of a sanity check.

At vain, no idea why you see the mobile boards site, could you have selected it in the quick style chooser? its at the botton of each forum page?

seamus

I never use the front page, so my input is probably useless. I do like the filter though.

I noticed others mentioning that the last poster is gone. An idea may be to include the last poster in the TITLE attribute of the thread link. So when you hover over it, you get the full title of the thread as well as the last post, so for example it appears as

Front Page Layout; Last post: 11:05 by seamus

Two other small things;

I would recommend increasing the number of character in the truncated thread title to 50, or 40 if that's too much. 25 characters will just cut off almost every title; looks messy and personally irritates me a lot.

Also, another cosmetic issue on the thread titles - use the ellipsis only where it's required. When a thread title hasn't been truncated - don't use an ellipsis.

<?php echo (strlen($title) > 50)? "..." : "" ?>

Boston

Vexorg wrote: »

Next the "Last Poster", I have to admit to being surprised that would be missed, given the sheer volume of posts and the chances you might see a poster of interest rather than a topic of interest, cleearly stalking is importmnat to some people:) We will see how this can be incorporated and if it proves difficult, we can see if it can be enabled through a user control panel option.

V.

For me, its not a case of stalking posters but rather threads. When I see a thread I posted on the main page I tend to look for the last poster so I know whether or not a new post has been added since the last time I looked at it. Quiet handy is a fast flowing thread.

But also what others have said. When I see a certain someone has replied to a thread I rub my hands together with glee because I know its going to be something witty, cutting, funny, intelligent, ect ect.

*I don't actually rub my hands together.

copacetic

Vexorg wrote: »

In relation to the slow page load can anyone affected by it do a check against www.boards.ie/index-old.php also - a bit of a sanity check.

At vain, no idea why you see the mobile boards site, could you have selected it in the quick style chooser? its at the botton of each forum page?

hmmm, apologies, should have checked that before the whinge.
the old page is loading just as slow for me now. appears the change has just coincided with a slow period for my mobile broadband.

on the phone though, it appears the iphone doesn't like the new background image. or is that just me also?

r3nu4l

Vexorg wrote: »

The day as usual is not turning out as planned so tweaking the page may not happen today.

IMHO - the most important issue, the page should not be taking much longer to load - this will have to be looked at - for me it loads faster than index-old.

Funny, the new index page loads far faster for me than the old one.

Next the "Last Poster", I have to admit to being surprised that would be missed, given the sheer volume of posts and the chances you might see a poster of interest rather than a topic of interest...

Last Poster - I couldn't care less if it's there or not. Why not trial the pages for a while, allow people to choose 'old index' or 'new index' in their profile settings.

You could force all new registrants to use the new index page and track the take-up of the new index page amongst the current users. Just a thought.

I really don't see the pressing need to know who last posted on a particular topic. The front page refreshes so quickly that it can't be that important.

Dades

basquille wrote: »

I changed my mind about the bright background to the top-menu.. looks pretty odd. This might be better:



Whatcha think?

+1 for this, btw. It looks great I think.


Regarding the boardsie characters...



Maybe it's time to let go?
I think the ones on the footer are great - less... finicky.
That goes for the right hand links too.

Quick suggested mock up (using basquille's nav idea)...
(Right hand navs are shoddy example only)

copacetic

r3nu4l wrote: »

I really don't see the pressing need to know who last posted on a particular topic. The front page refreshes so quickly that it can't be that important.

seys u!

most people seemed to really like the feature, why take it away?

Basq

Dades wrote: »

+1 for this, btw. It looks great I think

Finally, some support!

And your mock-up looks great also.. definitely looks cleaner and fresher using the new guys at top!

Anyone have any thoughts on my other suggestion? Reducing the number of new posts to make Social.ie and Adverts.ie tables aligned.. as outlined here!

JohnK

Three things from me
1. I always found the last poster name useful so if that can come back great
2. The Google ad just looks too wide and unbalances the page for me. Couldn't you use the long narrow version?
3. The background image is appearing below the top navigation menu for me and doesn't matter what browser I'm using - ie7, ff3 & chrome. I'm guessing this isnt how is supposed to be based on the other screen shots posted?

Basq

JohnK wrote: »

3. The background image is appearing below the top navigation menu for me and doesn't matter what browser I'm using - ie7, ff3 & chrome. I'm guessing this isnt how is supposed to be based on the other screen shots posted?

This is the way it's being loaded at the moment.. the screenshots above are suggestions.

JohnK

thank **** for that, I thought I was going mad for a moment there

dudara

I often have an RSS sidebar open in Firefox and the boards frontpage resizes itself accordingly.

However, the Boards Events and the Google advertisement stay full width, forcing the list of new posts to become very thin.

I'd much prefer that the Boards Events and Google Advertisement were much smaller and/or below/above the list of new posts.

Hellrazer

Vexorg wrote: »

In relation to the slow page load can anyone affected by it do a check against www.boards.ie/index-old.php also - a bit of a sanity check.

At vain, no idea why you see the mobile boards site, could you have selected it in the quick style chooser? its at the botton of each forum page?

New front page is like being back on 56k for me(using Firefox)

Its grand on IE7.

Old page is the same on both.

Sully

Its probably a bit to much work, but you could always use a system like the Google homepage (customised) allows you to do - moving things around, removing features you dont want etc. instead of having everything "static" as such. Though, probably a good bit of work invovled.

Gandalf23

I've been living with the new front page using a variety of computers and mobile devices since the change. It is definitely slower to load than the old page on all of them.

TBH I dont like the new page. Personally, I dont care much about the omission of last poster, but the Google ad's are far too big and take away significantly from the look and feel of the page. I'm also not a huge fan of the clouds ... if they are being used on the front page they should be used all across the site (golden rule = keep corporate logos / colours consistent at all times and across all pages were possible).

I think the guys at digg have done a much better job with their front page. They have just as much ad space, but they have included it in a less intrusive way. Also the feel of the site (colours and navigation etc) are consistent.

Boards.ie has a great change to design a brilliant front page that may potentially significantly improve the site. This new front page is not it.

Im_No_Superman

Im firmly in the "missing the last poster" camp, so it would be great if that feature was brought back.

Other than that I think the front page looks pretty good, the clouds are grand, pretty indifferent to them tbh, the google ads on the right hand side to need abit of tweeking though as they do look alittle out of place imo.

aidan_walsh

The page has been changed that if you hover over the title of the thread you will now see who the last poster is.