New site

"A Short period of time" in the context of the your post is important. A lot of first-time visitors to websites make decisions on whether to bookmark a site or at least keep note of certain sites are based on what they see and can access in a short period of time visiting that website.

B3D may be different, however.

Note : I still detest the way news are presented (i.e. two columns). Turn the two columns into one (somehow putting RSS somewhere) would make news more attractive to read simply because each news post occupies more real estate and that there's less scrolling to read all the news. The way it is, the 2 columns may confuse readers as to the sequence of news.

Just MHO.

 

Ok, this is a new bloody record....we agree twice about something on the same day?

One thing I remember clearly from my days in sales that has stuck with me, "You got three seconds to make the sale, the first three seconds are your make or break.".

It's not right, and it doesn't apply to some demographics...but it fits too many times amazingly well.

 

Since the new site launched, new visitor retention (people who view more than the main page, so they've decided we're worth at least a 2nd click to view our content or hit the forums) has been healthy (as in it's measurably higher than with the old site).

Again, we track all feedback and make changes based on it if we feel it's the right thing to do, so keep constructive feedback coming.

 

Or should that be "since we started posting CeBIT news items in near-real-time"...

Jawed

 

No. It has helped, of course, but no.

 

My turn:

I like the new style now that I have used it a bit but the front page news has a problem in my eyes.
There needs to be a more physical separation (a border for instance) around the individual news items.

The logo on the right hand side made me think of a football initially and taking a look at it there is still that impression.


NB: If I have not criticised anything else it probably means I like it ...

 

One thing I liked about the old site that's missing here is a way to easily tell that there are new news stories. I always enter via the front page to get to the forums and I don't always bother scrolling down to look at all the news. It was nice that the old site had the new stories headlined near the top and the full text was below.

I'm not sure what the best way to solve this issue is, but it'd be nice to be able to quickly tell what's new. Maybe there could be an "Updates" section and a cookie could be used to limit what's shown.

Also, my main laptop has a 1280x768 display and sometimes the Beyond3D logo is above the banner ad which really limits what can be read above the fold. Using Firefox 1.5.

 

I just saw the G80 performance article, and I was struck by the amount of whitespace in the second and third pages (as far as I'm going to get tonight). Could you run text alongside images (my preference: images on the right, text on the left, because I value B3D's analysis more than its graphs)? The system setup page could be similarly compressed by placing the system specs and tests run in two columns, followed by the test notes.

 

My only problem with the main page is that it's using two columns. Imho it would be better if there weren't two columns but only one and this column would only contain news items, in a descending order. Of course if you publish a new article you could create a news item for it. I'm so used to reading news from top-to-bottom that the new layout is really hard to read.

 

Thanks for the "wider" and "narrower" buttons, by the way.

Jawed

 

No worries, hope they're working alright and that 100px jumps are decent. We can adjust that if people want more granular control, in the absence of a truly fluid page layout.

 

Neither of them did anything on my machine As such, I have no idea what they're supposed to do.

 

They adjust page width, primarily for those with monitors larger than the site's default 1200px max width. If they don't do anything for you, the likely causes are you aren't using a viewport wide enough to see any effect, or you aren't accepting cookies.

 

I'm concerned with the readability of the articles on the site when the main body of the text is presented in a sans serif font.

Everything I've learned about readability of long texts mentions serif fonts being better for the main body and that a sans serif font should only really be used in headings and short passages like that.