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TechSpot RSSTechSpot
Welcome to the new TechSpot!
in-house feature
I’m really pleased to present to you our new design and face for the years to come. Built around the strengths of our old layout, the new design brings some much needed changes and improvements, both from a visual and functional perspective.
The new design was thought out to be cleaner and more modern from the inside out. The new base code no longer relies in tables but is fully drawn from CSS/XHTML, which should result in faster loading pages, and for us, an easier way to control how content is displayed. Kudos must go to Mike Rohde, formerly of Makalumedia, for his creative artwork, and Evan Agee, who worked on coding. Thanks a lot guys!
In total we spent around 8 months planning, designing and implementing the new design. Of course, we couldn’t dedicate in full to it but this played to our advantage as we had plenty of time to test many different things, and experiment with what ultimately became the new revamped TechSpot.
Even when a sizable amount of time was spent checking for browser compatibility, we don’t expect this first phase of the implementation to go 100% bug free, so please let us know if you find something that is not working for you. You will notice that a few new things have been added like news channels, improved tabbed navigation with clickable sub-menus, tabbed search for different site sections and Google search in one click, a load of new sub-sections (e.g. most popular downloads) and things like Top Stories. We recommend you browse around and find what’s new.
At the same time, there are a few features that are still pending to be coded like a new poll system, so please bear with us in this respect. Most notably, our forums are not yet converted to the new layout. Rest assured that comes next in our list of priorities, in fact, as I was typing this we already received a lot of positive feedback from you guys in our boards. Thank you.
We also understand that not everybody welcomes change as widely as we wished for, however we truly believe the new design is a huge step forward and as has been the case before, in a matter of weeks or even days most of you will feel at home again as you get used to the new colors and organization of the site.
As always, thank you for your continued support and look forward bringing more and better content your way, soon.
User Comments (41)
Post a comment| fullmetalvegan on July 6, 2008 6:11 AM | I don't like the colour scheme, too white. Bring out a black version. =P
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| Greenman on July 6, 2008 6:26 AM | RSS feeds now contain 'localhost' rather than techspot.com. Whoops! Please fix.
I like to new look. Simple is good.
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| Julio on July 6, 2008 6:43 AM | Thanks for the note, I have fixed the RSS bug now.
FYI, further discussion is taking place in the forums (with the old layout, though  ): http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic107965.html
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| Didou on July 6, 2008 7:57 AM | Are the forums next in line for a design change ?
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| Julio on July 6, 2008 8:26 AM | Indeed they are. I mentioned this in the post... or was it in the forums? Anyway, I'm working on it as we speak.
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| canadian on July 6, 2008 9:24 AM | This seems more ad intensive, but possibly just because they are bigger on the side. Overall, its not bad.
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| dustin_ds3000 on July 6, 2008 9:39 AM | nice job on the new look Julio, the home page loads in 5 or 6 secs for me and im on dial-up. great job
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| BMfan on July 6, 2008 9:48 AM | looks much better,i am using a hd crt so text looks better for me,Thanx
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| Paul_K on July 6, 2008 9:52 AM | AWESOME JOB GUYS!!!
The new site is fresh, clean, functional and tight! Thanks for the hard work. I have come to TechSpot for years and I appreciate the site so much. Thanks again and I for one will definitely enjoy the improvements! Paul Kern
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| fly_guy on July 6, 2008 10:41 AM | NICE JOB!! new look is amazing and looks so much more modern then the old one :]
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| masoud_ata on July 6, 2008 12:14 PM | The font is really bad. I don't know why, maybe because it's too thin or something. Can you fix it? It just doesn't look right.
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| chickenroyal on July 6, 2008 12:46 PM | Excellent new layout, love it! Nice job
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| Finchy on July 6, 2008 4:43 PM | I like the new layout, it's very modern and clean with lots of features in a simple layout.
Good job guys
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| boogityboo04 on July 6, 2008 8:45 PM | Originally posted by masoud_ata:
The font looks great for me. Make sure you don't have some weird setting in your browser for how it renders fonts. Maybe check if you have anti aliased fonts enabled or not.
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| Nick Lee on July 6, 2008 9:30 PM | (O.O) I'm scared... lol I'm just kidding. I love this new layout. This was a job well done.
*Gives a thumbs up and a huge smile* d(^_^)Z
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| Julio on July 6, 2008 10:51 PM | I no longer have a CRT around to see how the new design looks in one, but I also suspect it could be a matter of font smoothing.
I guess some people will find the new design too bright, at least at first instance when compared to the older layout which had a darker background. But as far as the main font in concerned we have kept it Arial 13px/10pt which is a very legible and standard font for web reading. Thanks for the feedback guys, keep it coming.
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| boykov on July 7, 2008 12:54 AM | For a moment i thought i was in the wrong place....
The new Look looks Great... Cheers
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| gamejunkie72792 on July 7, 2008 1:28 AM | hmm i like it, but its too bright for me, a black or "graphite" version would be pretty sweet. but i could get used ti this.
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| gbe300 on July 7, 2008 2:34 AM | I am already missing the old look, but this is a great upgrade! Definitely loads faster and is a nice face lift. Great job!
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| masoud_ata on July 7, 2008 2:51 AM | I have the aforementioned font problem in the following setting:
LCD (Laptop) @ 1680x1050 I checked TechSpot in 2 more scenarios: LCD (PC) @ 1280x1024 and LCD (Laptop) @ 1920x1200 And it looked just fine. The problem is that, other sites look fine on my laptop(1680x1050) and I used both Firefox 3 and IE 7 to check TechSpot, and they both rendered it badly, so it can't be because of my browser settings. As a side note, the previous Techspot layout looked fine on my laptop (No font issue). Anyway, thanks for replying.
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| Julio on July 7, 2008 3:14 AM | If you could send me a screenshot I will be more than glad to look into the matter. I'm starting to think you may have changed the default DPI settings within Windows, but then TechSpot alone shouldn't be the problem. We also have tried to counter this very well-known issue by using relative font sizes.
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| thejedislayer on July 7, 2008 3:45 AM | Well, I have to admit that this is a cool theme, I think I prefer the other theme, as it was more techie like, in my opinion. Still, very nice.
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| JudaZ on July 7, 2008 3:47 AM | ...sorry to say, the new design is worthless...
To white, very buggy, and I really miss the old one. It was easy to read, easy to find information you wanted.. This is just white!, and looks like everyone else. I first time i saw it i though i typed the wrong address so i re-type twice before i understood, my favorite page is gone. ...i guess i have to get used to it, hope you fix all the bugs soon. Even the comment box is really buggy, and slow, and I'm om a 100Mbit line the whole page is updating very slow, took almost 5 min to load the page. and then still when i'm typing this comment it feels like its still working on something and the text is "dragging behind while i type."
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| JudaZ on July 7, 2008 3:50 AM | "which should result in faster loading pages"
it really doesnt, before , last month , I had a 0,5Mbit connection (3G connection on the road) Now i have a 100/100 line , and the page is slower now then a month ago when you still used the nice design..
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| [-Steve-] on July 7, 2008 4:05 AM | I really like the new design, its modern and it’s clean. It also fills the screen much better which is important with 2560 horizontal pixels 
The fonts looks normal for me on all my systems, the white is easy on the eyes and as for load times … well they are still lightning fast for me on my slow ADSL connection!
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