the forum..? she's sweet, but, but, but the BLOG???
my eyes aaaaagh...!they CANNOT handle all the mish mash of styles fonts sizes and scattering of stuff all over the place. Migraine inducing material.
CW, this is seriously bad. Pleeze leave the blog alone..now its readable, the new proposal ain't.

no offence,.. but your spending a few hundred dollars for it to look exactly the same except cram'd full of ads.. waste of money!

Yeah! - like it cw. The new grapics give it a lift. But gee, how I wish the average P.C user didn't have to sideways scroll to read items. Others have managed their sites so it isn't necessary. C'mon cw, you can too!

I like it a lot, full but not busy. I would swap sides re top banner advertising with Blog header though, this would appear more natural to my eye.

Saint Charles,

Four columns! You are a daring devil. I think it looks great, just about every aspect covered clearly. Thanks for forking over the hard earned to spiff it up as Bleeding Edge is a gold mine for your readers.

P.S. Streetwise has come a long way from the days when desultory salesmen kept a straight face trying to sell Epson printers, to the kind of place, as you recently described, where I set my stopwatch upon entering. When the buzzer goes off I leave pronto or, for the rest of the day, berate myself for being such a weakly coward. Albeit one with joyous new goodies.

P.P.S. I too upgraded to 3.2 a few months back but found the new templates hair-tearingly teeth-chatteringly hideously complicated. Weeks of careful study would have been required - all at a time when the country was and is falling apart around me. So I'm still using the old temps and ranting on unimpeded.

Thanks for BE. TGW

Justin, what resolution are you running your monitor in? On mine I don't have to scroll, and even at 1024x768 all the content is viewable for me. Are you using large fonts?

Ian, I asked Evelyn (who did this mockup) about the mish-mash of fonts that, as you point out, is rather icky... She tells me that the final version will not look like that, but will have the same fonts as the current version.

Evelyn is an artist, not a techie, so Charles will get his HTML/CSS guru to create the actual templates which implement the prototypes that Evelyn is mocking up. At this stage all that the prototype reflects is a general direction.

Jeremy,
phew...thats a load off the mind..if the fonts
in the new version of the blog don't make me go crosseyed (as the sample site does)..I am ok
with the overall layout, but I also support Justins comment re the slidebars...at 1024x768 with small fonts, the page does not fit sideways (on Firefox or Mozilla browser)

cheers

But how will it look when you have Adblock?

Nope. Don't like it at the moment. Forum posting
here

Thanks for the feedback, Ananda. I see the issue you are referring to. Evelyn attempted to make sure all the content fits at 1024 x 768. As you see, the only thing cut off on the right is some advertising.

To make the right-hand ads fit too, Charles would have to accept either changing the Bleeding Edge logo size, or use only a half-size ad banner in the top left. The two added together bring the width to greater than 1024 pixels.

Layout works and the ads seem to impact in the right places. The font size and kerning etc are better in the old blog. Have you thought about san serif which, without the wiggly bits, is a better read onscreen? Serif is very paper. Having said that, it's academic what I think as I tend to read everything via feeds in Safari.

[Reposted by cw. Ed attached it to the wrong post.]

Jeremy,

My screen is set at 800 x 600. If I change to 1024 x 768 I don't have to scroll, but it has other disadvantages. Isn't the nub the problem that some web designers have moved from 800 x 600 pixels to 1024 x 768 pixels and thus we have to tolerate sideways scrolling?

Here's what I would prefer (the re-composit is a bit shoddy, but you'll get what I mean).

Can't get the image embedded here.

See for forum

Ananda, from what I understand the difference in your version is that the forum content stretches to use up all the available width - is that right? I'm sure that will be done if possible - the current forum mockup is just an image, so it doesn't resize with the screen. Are there any other changes you are suggesting?

Charles,
locating your header on the right seems counter-intuitive. You risk the brand in the advertising on the left being associated with the content, not you.

The whole right hand side is also cut off on my 15" iBook.

The strength of the site is your personal brand (reputation), so whilst advertising revenue is important to support your business, you also presumably can't afford to dilute the strength of your brand. It should be the most prominent item, and advertisers will seek to purchase space because of the strength of your brand amongst a niche audience.

Hi Jeremy,

Forum content stretching to all available width and still being within the non scroll region is a good idea.

But no, that wasn't the original aim of my posting. My intent was/is, that the Google Ad-Sense Text ads not be on the left but on the right. Having text on the left disrupts the brain's reading pattern - as you read one line in the forum content and then scan the next line, the Google Ad-Sense ad on the left dominates and your mind wants to read the Google Text Ad as part of the forum content.

My contention is that if the Google Text Ad is on the right, the brain knows that this is not forum content and does not disrupt reading of the main content.

Similarly, but more for design aesthetics, the page banner - Toad and the graphic buttons dominate the page (and they should) if they are on the top left corner. If you place the Graphic Ad on the top left corner, you have relegated the Graphic Ad to owning the page - which much reduces the ownership and credibility of the forum and the blog in terms of commercial sellout.

It's not what you say, it's how you say it.

Agreed. I'll ask Evelyn to shift the display ads to the right.

I'm not convinced about the Google ads going to the right, however. At the moment, the Google ads are the only source of revenue. I wan't people to be aware that they are there, and hopefully click on them.

cw

Make sure then, that the Google Ads are fully visible. IMHO, one could bear the Blog with GADs on the left but the forum discussions require some amount of concentration and the GADs on the left continually disrupt eye travel and thus the mind.

While on a shopping site, anything goes because the concentration is brief and you're not reading content deeply, just looking for a product box shot or a product pic. Forum content IMHO requires more commitment.

You're the business owner though, so it's your call.

You might gain some inspiration from Robin Williams's simple book - The Non-Designer's Web Book

Only one little request - on the recent forum threads bit, can you make a separation of sorts between the successive threads - I find it sometimes confusing trying to figure out where one stops and another begins. Maybe alternating background colours, or slight lines

Looks fantastic - especially the forum. The heading/logo on the main page should be on the left, not the right. The fonts are AA+++

If going to the trouble of updating the Forum, do you realise is about 7 Phpbb versions behind and open to security problems ,just a thought?

Your installation does not seem to be up to date. Updates are available for your version of phpBB, please visit http://www.phpbb.com/downloads.php to obtain the latest version.
The latest available version is phpBB 2.0.18.You are running phpBB 2.0.11.

I generally like the new format.

Regarding Google ads, since I followed your advice many months ago (can't remember which piece of advice exactly, I just do as you say!) I don't see them any more. It had something to do with ad blocking in Firefox, hosts files, or something. I would like to support your excellent site by clicking on some ads but you have been too true to your journalistic ethics and I suspect taught many of us how to remove ads.

How do we get them back?

Just a few comments:

Like with The Age redesign (which I don't think works at all) innovation must be weighed up against what people are comfortable with. Having two layers of navigation to the right is counter-intuitive, imo. Plus you seem to be saying different things in the one navigation pane - recent comments, plus services, plus advertising. Identify and group like links, rather than just putting them where they fit.

There are a few too many contrasting fonts and you might want to consider increasing the line height to space the text out a little more. It looks like the content is crammed in, mostly because the font is all squashy. A bit of whitespace in the lines might make all the difference.

Cheers.