New Design - Official Comments Thread

[Jesse]

In the last few hours we transitioned ActionScript.org to a brand new design, and a new backend system! Phew! This has been brewing in the background for a couple of months, an we're really glad it's done!

There were several key reasons for this the change. The fancy new design is accompanied by an upgrade to the Content Management System which runs things behind the scenes. We believe the recent site timeout issues which some users had been experiencing were due to an issue with the older version of the CMS, so we're hopeful this will now mean those issues cease.

We're aware that there may be some bugs arising out of the changes. As you spot them, please let us know so we can get onto fixing them! If you have comments or suggestions please post them here. Please ensure all criticism is constructive; we're sensitive people.

Some changes will be immediately obvious;

• A new colour scheme (based heavily on the old colour scheme!)
• An adapted site logo, and top menu
• A new two column design, Vs the old three column

There are other changes behind the scene which we're pretty excited about too. For the geeks in the crowd they include:

• It renders faster: The new design is (almost) tableless and makes better use of CSS. We're still working to improve it further.
• It loads faster: Pages are lighter-weight with most Articles being approximately 50% of their former size (in kilobytes).
• Nicer to the server: Caching is deployed
• A bunch of other stuff

Known issues so far:

• The forums are fixed width! Oh no! We're thinking about it... Comment below if you feel strongly one way or the other
• FIXED - The Library section is a little broken. We're working on it.
• FIXED - The Google search in the menu isn't working. It will soon.
• Some articles don't load properly - probably because they have imperfect HTML in the article itself; please let us know exactly which articles as you find them, and we'll look into it.

OK now it's your turn. What do you like? What don't you like? How can we improve it? What have you found that's broken or seems to not work properly?

Thanks heaps!

[ASWC]

Thanks for getting rid of the ugly gradient background! I have to say I hated it. Now the new one is nicer and much more discret! Good job.

[pan69]

Congrats with the new site. I can already notice a massive speed increase in page loads (or maybe it's just because it's sunday morning )

Yeah, ditch the fixed column sizes, that's pretty poor usability. I didn't buy a wide screen display to be then forced to be stuck in someone else's personal preference. Especially the forum pages become very crowded this way.

Another thing that's been bothering me for a long time are the tool tips that pop up when you hover a forum list. The tool tips don't really contribute anything and they usually only obscure another area you want to look at or read.

Other than that, keep up the great work!

http://www.lukeschreur.com

[guiltfilter]

nice work, the new site loads much faster and layout is improved, the new header design is good, although I think the colors could be more consistent with the rest of the site.

well done dudes.

//

[SPOCK]

i like the change, good work, congratulations

[panel]

Orange is extravagant, but it has it's charm
Forum works much faster

[Cota]

I love the speed increase...

[Flash Gordon]

Even though I'm not a huge poster at the moment, I'm still around daily; but I got to say I haven't noticed a speed increase. The tutorials don't timeout for me anymore, but they still take a while. I always thought the forums were good as they were, especially compared to the fk.com. Maybe they are faster, but I was just always satistifed before...dunno. [EDIT]umm...maybe it was just my bandwidth earlier. this thing is flying now! wow! [/EDIT]

I'm not a huge fan of the orange header, but I love the new blue/red buttons with the soft background. Overall, it looks fantastic!

And my vote is on liquid forms width.

Great job jesse/stok/ and gang!!!

[Mazoonist]

I love the new look, especially the orange and red header (oops, sorry, FG).

Side issue: Since the change, now when I reply to forum posts, I no longer get email notification like I used to, even though I'm subscribed to a particular thread.

[Flash Gordon]

1 thing I would like changed is that HYPER-LINKS are now the same color as regular text. Can we make a distinction between links and text???