TechSpot 3.0

Julio Franco

Julio Franco

Posts: 9,099   +2,049
Staff member
All work and no play makes Julio a dull boy
All work and no play makes Julio a dull boy
All work and no play makes Julio a dull boy
All work and no play makes Julio a dull boy
All work and no play makes Julio a dull boy
All work and no play makes Julio a dull boy -- TechSpot 3.0 is coming :cool:

techspot-30.png
 
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Oh, so that's what it's supposed to look like. Couldn't tell the details of the icon on the browser tab on my screen. Looks a bit like the recycling logo. 9-6-3 sides, interesting.
 
I see.. interesting change! Are the forums getting a makeover too?

Thoughts: Make the featured content 2/3 of the current size at the largest. It just takes up way too much vertical space at the moment.

Not sure I like the font yet. It makes quoted text pretty small too.
 
Nice one, Julio. Looks pretty good.

One slight bug I've just noticed: The 'Forums>Recent Activity' doesn't link correct when anywhere else in the 'Forums' section it seems. Still, early days and all that.
 
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Damn I am LOVING the new design of the site! It is sexy as hell, But it did take like 5 seconds for everything to load in but if it gets decreased due to cache I am all down for that!.

1 Suggestion tho is when you go on the main page it has those metro style like trending articles with the pictures on I would suggest getting that on every page so its like we can see the main articles even if were not on the main page.
 
Thank you guys for the support, we are still working to fix a few known bugs and others we didn't know about pre-launch, it's been an interesting 6-month ride but I'm really glad that we finally got here :)
 
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Hmm obscure access to Recent Activity on the Forums:
Home Page=>hover over Forums -> drop down menus and icons.

Certainly that will not fly for mobile access (ie no hover support).

Personally, I would opt for information content over eye candy. oh well ...
 
Desktop PC user.

Header drop downs - Okay but a little bit cluttered
Standard Articles layout - Good, a nice balance of text and a small image.
Articles themselves - The images are way too large, they take up more space than the article itself.
Main page images - Way too large again, I now get 1 article on the homepage.
Comments section on articles - Very messy, hard to tell who said what.

In short, not a good design change at present as it has far too much eye candy.

I personally come to read the articles not see almost fullscreen images of Apple logos or Steve Ballmer.
 
Thanks once again for your kind comments.

I'm glad to see a majority is liking the redesign with few exceptions (mostly where bugs are present, but we are working on it).

@Benny26 link is fixed.

@jobeard, actually the forum is now more feature complete than it was on the mobile site, but point taken, I will see how to add this link in a more accessible place for mobile users. The mobile responsive site is lighter than the full site, not only in code but visually, too.

@Dasboot, note that in articles/reviews, pages 2 and beyond have a smaller header and vertically speaking you actually get to content before than in the previous design. It's one of those subtle changes you won't notice at first, but we thought about it. As for the first landing page, we just love how articles like this look with the big masthead:
https://www.techspot.com/article/777-litecoin-mining-project/

also for you @Dasboot, we are trying to figure out the bug about comments since we see it just fine across OSes and browsers (see screenshot below of how we see it). Can you help us troubleshooting in this thread?
https://www.techspot.com/community/topics/ts-3-0-redesign-bug-reports.201100/

What OS and browser version are you using?

This is how comments are supposed to look like:

techspot-comments-good.png
 
Not really a bug report (so posting here rather than the bug thread), but I can't find a 'mark forums read' option anywhere.
 
@SNGX1275 what is more useful? A 'mark forums read' option in the header drop down menu or in the forum home (sidebar or below the fold)?
 
I think it would be great to have it in the sidebar. However having it in the drop down along side the 'recent activity', 'most recent topics', and 'watched topics' would also be acceptable.
 
Julio Franco said:
@Dasboot, note that in articles/reviews, pages 2 and beyond have a smaller header and vertically speaking you actually get to content before than in the previous design. It's one of those subtle changes you won't notice at first, but we thought about it. As for the first landing page, we just love how articles like this look with the big masthead:
https://www.techspot.com/article/777-litecoin-mining-project/
Click to expand...

Wow, I disagree heavily with your opinion of the linked content. 1080 vertical pixels doesn't even get the whole first paragrah on the screen, when using Opera fullscreen (minimal vert space taken). That goes against all design theories I've learnt, and I'm sure it goes against the grain of other readers too.

An - just because I haven't explicitly said it - overall I do like the design. :) Good job, that you have time to try new things out.
 
Julio Franco said:
@Dasboot, note that in articles/reviews, pages 2 and beyond have a smaller header and vertically speaking you actually get to content before than in the previous design. It's one of those subtle changes you won't notice at first, but we thought about it. As for the first landing page, we just love how articles like this look with the big masthead:
https://www.techspot.com/article/777-litecoin-mining-project/

also for you @Dasboot, we are trying to figure out the bug about comments since we see it just fine across OSes and browsers (see screenshot below of how we see it). Can you help us troubleshooting in this thread?
https://www.techspot.com/community/topics/ts-3-0-redesign-bug-reports.201100/

What OS and browser version are you using?

This is how comments are supposed to look like:
Click to expand...

OS - Windows 8.1
Browser - Firefox Nightly 31

The comments are now fixed, yesterday the spacing was incorrect now however they are exactly the same as in your attachment.

I personally don't like huge images either on the main page or articles, a few other sites have all dabbled with something along this lines and all ended up reverting to a smaller images or images off to the sidebar (Wired, Lifehacker, Engadget). For instance I immediately wrote a Stylish script to get rid of Techspots header images and it looks more like a tech news site again.

My personal favourite techsite layout is Ars technica, it has decent sized images in either headline or standard layouts, uses a sidebar to fill unused screen real estate and the articles are not swamped by images.

Also as I have adblock installed (as a great many users have) I get a fairly hefty empty grey bar at the top of every article page.
 
I'll say it this way: Useability and Readability trumps Eye candy and Client-Side technology (eg: css, javascript/DOM); after all, those webcrawling robots don't index the technologies do they, just the content.

As noted by someone else, there's a lot of screen real estate squandered by font sizes and useless spacing, and it takes almost all of my 15.6 monitor.

May I suggest trying a test template eschewing tables and using pure CSS, avoiding all fixed width/height usage, and deferring to width=xx% or height=yy% to allow browser scaling. One measure of design is to avoid horizontal scrolling at all costs - - on every web page layout.
 
@jobeard, mind sharing a screenshot of what is bothering you. Usability and clean design was at the top of my priority list all along as I worked on the redesign.

Now, there are some things lost in translation as you start from sketch to mockup, and then to actual HTML. I've performed no less than 100 tweaks since last week when the design was nearly done, and then a bunch others since the launch to fix bugs and remove unnecessary bloat as my eyes settle down on some of the redesign details and I see the design working across the site with live content.

I believe the adjustment process is not much different for readers like yourself. Some things will feel off until you settle on the dramatic changes (cough... improvements *nerd*), while some others will continue to feel off a week or month from now, and those are the ones we want to attack in the coming days until TS feels as solid as ever.
 
My problem is shown in the picture attached. I have a 1920x1200 monitor, which has more vertical space than the 'average' user of 16:9 screens has at 1366x768, or even 1920x1080. I'm using a browser which is probably the lightest on UI elements and so takes up the least space.

By my calculations, the actual content of the full-screen page is only 8.2%. Sure, if I window the browser and pull in the sides a bit it will be better, but the screenshot is taken at 100% zoom with no DPI scaling on windows. The fact that 1200 pixels barely gets to the article is not a good thing at all. :( I assume 720p monitor users won't even see the entire featured image without scrolling?

Also, this is using the page 2-onwards layout, which is a little bit better. I also agree that percentage-based layout should be used instead of px, if that's what's happening.

In any case, things like this won't push me away from the site... but it is definitely not ideal for me. :p
 

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