Our New Site! Live and unleashed

I’m finding the new look a little strange actually. Am kind of preferring the old look. But am sure will get used to it :slight_smile:

Its differnet, I like the banner at the head of the page :slight_smile:

site looks good, just not working properly!!

Issues this morning:

  • When clicking recent posts, list comes up but if you try and click through to a thread error message arrives

  • Resizing doesn’t work on Iphone (safari) browser meaning you can click on recent posts!

Lovin’ your work Jay (et all) :smiley:

I agree, i thought there was a problem with the page loading as everything is massive.

especially the title bar, logo and advert (but i guess you ned this as big as possible to pay all your bills)

I also think theres far too much information your trying to display on the forum page.

Its like a bombardment of not always usefull information- When you hover past an avatar eg to scroll down the page, its not really necessary to have a blow out bubble of everyones statistics - eg jo blogs from liverpool, likes fishing, joined in jan 2010, total posts 3000, which represents 0.005% of all posts…

+1 and seems slower to load. Why the change :hehe:

For people finding it too big.

Hold down the CTRL key and scroll your mouse wheel, you will find the site magically changes size and you can match it to what it was before.

I too found it too large when I first arrived, because I AM an old codger and my tired old eyes needed the old site supersized to see anything, so when I came to the new site, which is much better in that respect, the supersizing made it way too large.

That doesnt help, because although it will get the title bar down to an acceptable level, it makes everything else unreadable

Congratulations on your site uplift - looks like quite a big job, and a bit more than “just” redesign.

It does all seem more modern, open and friendly - and may well be more inviting to newer users.

The old site was getting a little retro, but was fast to load and compact text - so fast to read. Some sites have a “text size” option to help control such things (most for poor eye-sight usability, but can work the other way).

I am a bit wary of Javascript loading of content (i.e. with the rototing circle). Quite often on sites I see this just “hang”, so its good to have it do some sort of “retry” after a few seconds, rather than wait forever. Even YouTube doesn’t do this great.

I was a bit surprised to get a good few emails this morning say “Jetstream has posted!”. It seems like quite a nice Facebook/Twitter like feature … though can go a bit nuts on busy posts. I figured out how to get alerts ona and off (by clicking the big crossed/ticks) … though sometimes they didn’t seem to switch status. It would also be good to just have a single alerts on/off facility if not available already?

Cheers & well done,

Alex

Not anti, as any new look takes some getting used to - but

  1. Everything seems to take up too much space so not very usable on my 11" netbook.

  2. Font size and layout seem to be hard wired which means site does not display on my Android phone as the page defaults to loading everything on the page at high zoom (overriding the phone’s settings which are set to do the opposite), but zooming out still displays everything but now too small to read. Never seen a forum do this before on the phone. In fact I usually do all my forum reading and posting on the phone, which now no longer possible for LB.

  3. Pages take an age to load (Chrome) for example, clicking on the button to see page two of this thread took three minutes to load the second page.

  4. The page seems full of unnecessary code with all sorts of irrelevant stuff popping up. I even managed to get up some strange console when I accidentally hit Cont and a key that gave access to all sorts of developer type stuff,

  5. The logo at the top looks too retro - where is the Shard?

Me likey. Looks like it’s had a wash. Agree with others on the massive font (I just changed my zoom on the browser until it’s adjusted), I’ve got no avatar yet. Curious to know about “Follow” feature - is that a licence to cyberstalk? (Edited to add: oh, maybe this is what Zander is talking about above.) Some of the autopopulating bits - ‘Most recent replies’, ‘Who’s online’, and ‘Latest poll’ don’t seem to be coming up with content for me - not sure if that’s a browser problem at my end or not (using latest Chrome).

Like the idea of a +1 or ‘Like’ button.

Hi all and thanks for sticking with us while the odds and ends are ironed out.

Mostly it’s all Jay’s work, nowt much to do with the rest of us. I supplied a fair bit of nagging along the lines “when the f…k is it gonna be ready?” but aside from that it’s all him.

We did the redesign primarily because a few years without change is a long time in the internet world, but also to incorporate a lot of usability missing from the old site.

For instance the size of the site is now full width because most people have 19" monitors or larger whereas 4/5 years ago it was more like 15" or at a push 17" average. By expanding the site out you get a better viewing experience. True the phone conversion isn’t brilliant yet, I need to resize it slightly on my Desire HD which has a bigger than most screen but that’ll be sorted soon - Jay uses his Iphone a lot for LB so if it’s bothering you, it’s bothering him.

The view issues will take some nailing down because the size of your monitor and preferred resolution (how big you have your display on your screen) can be very different user by user so what works for some might not work for others. It’s a setting which will never be perfect for everyone.

We wanted more interactivity with Twitter and Facebook and also to integrate (read copy) some of their interactive options and usually that means more screen space which the full width allows.

The home page is busier yes, but that’s because we’ve partitioned the news stories into categories meaning you get better navigation and any given news story will be visible on the home page for longer giving you more chance to notice it. Right now the news page/back end seems to be down for now though.

Hopefully the galleries are nicer to look at and show the images off better too which is important for us, the photographers and everyone who looks at them.

Remember, change isn’t always a bad thing :slight_smile:

I must say i like it…:w00t:

Oh and we are collating a list of issues reported (in the background) so don’t think your findings are going unheeded. We also take note of opinions too but you have to appreciate they take a lower priority than the actual bugs n stuff.

And yes we know it’s a little sluggish :slight_smile:

+1 :slight_smile:

The search is a bit weird. I just searched Essential Rubber and its def not listing most relevant first. So couldn’t find the post i was looking for. Also is listing every entry rather than just threads in the search results - an option to list threads/topics or every post containing search results would be nice.

But given up trying to read on my phone for now. Liking the new YouTube button on editing posts :slight_smile: Also great to be able to upload photo from PC from something other than IE!

Agree with others. It is a bit too … spacious …

“london’s home of biking”? Home of London’s bikers"?

I think this column is too wide - it only needs to be as wide as the ‘post count progress bar thingy’

<----------------

This is probably one of the reasons why people are saying everything is too big, if this column was narrower it would give back some of that precious screen real estate.

I also noticed I couldn’t upload any images for avatar, etc, and it does seem slower, but I’m sure you gents are already aware of this.

Other than that it is ‘different’, and might take a day or two to get used to it but I think it looks better, cleaner and more modern looking. I like it if the above things are fixed :smiley: Good job.

Looking good though as others have said will take a few days to get used to and find all the ins and outs of the site.

Luckily I’m at work so will have plenty of time to explore!!! :stuck_out_tongue: :smiley:

Edi: Getting an error everytime I try to upload a photo to my profile…

Thanks for the feedback all.

As Andrew says, we’re working through a list of issues, and taking onboard feedback.

We’ve done a fair bit of testing before launching the new site, but there’s some things that just require the real deal to see how things perform. We’re keeping an eye on things like performance at the moment.

Things like font size is an interesting point, and not something I expected to be picked up on, but we’ll consider a change if necessary. Mobile access is a sticking point for now. We do have a dedicated mobile version of the forums coming soon to address this, and yes, I too do not like the member-cards that you get when hovering over a user name.

It’ll all be addressed in time. Most of it quickly.

Thanks again for the feedback.

This is sexy. Like a sexy thing.