Thoughts about site design
On my 20" monitor
I quite enjoy the site layout, though I have some concerns about a lack of graphical separators and distinct graphical cues for: posting order, separation of postings, the navigation bar selections, and distinguishing the more minor or unconfirmed news from the more significant launches/reviews/articles/major news. In other words, I think design elements that convey the above information is missing or lacking emphasis that I think would improve site browsing experience.
Some examples that might serve this end, or at least convey my thinking about it:
- Track when last visited and whether an article/review has been read, and have some sort of graphical effect that subtly highlights News, Articles, Reviews, etc., items in the navigation bar when there are items that have appeared within the last few days (e.g., a blend from yellow to the current white for age within past 3 days), and have an animated attention-getting effect when there are articles that haven't been read (e.g., a slowly pulsing tab shape), and perhaps another effect if items are new since last visit (e.g., a sort of gleam effect ending in a star sparkling on an edge of the above mentioned tab)...the idea here is that when both are true the combination is more emphatic. I think this only applies to the first 4 entries, which (see below) I think might benefit from being separated from the rest.
This might be too complicated, but if you consider the effect I'm trying to describe, I think it might show the gist of what I'm trying to get across, of something that provides information at a quick glance about what has changed since the last visit, its nature, and quickly tells you where to click to get to it.
- And/or something of the above nature for the listings to the left that lists new articles and reviews. I think simple color coding and something simple (underlining?) for unread articles might serve.
- Indication, probably by icon would be simplest, but maybe by some sort of other thematic highlighting, of whether a news item is minor, or indicates a new article, a new review, or release of new product. I think this is important with the abundance of little snippets, informative though they may be.
Perhaps also have major news items to maybe be bigger or in some other way more prominent than the smaller news items or rumors, but otherwise have the same news icon/theme separate from articles, etc.
Some other comments on my experience of the new site on my monitor:
I would like text to be very slightly bigger for the "Latest..." items.
I would like text to be significantly bigger for the main text of the news items.
(These two items are perhaps just a case of getting used to change, as there is no significant
discomfort in trying to read the text so far, it just "feels" a bit less comfortable than it could be).
I like the RSS feed idea, but I think it needs some refining...but this seems to be the plan anyways. I'm not overly familiar with RSS feed possibilities, so I don't have any suggestions yet.
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Actually, where I might find more use for RSS is on my tablet pc...
On my 13.3" Widescreen tablet
One thing about a tablet is that, well, it tends to be quite useful to use in portrait mode. I really like the site in the apparently stated design goal of 1280 width or higher, but it is a disaster (I'll try a complete refresh later to see if the mentioned changes affect this) for me at 800 (i.e., my tablet's screen width in portrait mode).
I think a graceful narrow width fallback, as I think has been suggested, would be quite beneficial, and have some general suggestions/questions:
- The current text size that seems "small" and slightly less comfortable to me on a large screen, seems economical and necessary to me with a narrow width. Can font size be efficiently changed dynamically with viewport sizing?
- Two column news posting...I don't see how it can work with narrower screens. Can the site efficiently determine when single column would be best, and change accordingly?
- The navigator bar doesn't look its best when it splits. Can this be improved? I would think the first 4 could remain there by themselves, and the rest could be split off and put in a different orientation or moved aside in some other way.
...
Those are my thoughts, and I hope they are well received.
Oh, and kudos to the artist responsible for the logo/elements so far.
