Shoutbox

it looks like one of those advertising sites

Do something with the whitespace. Sure whitespace is good, but not in excess, with a few lines of colours here and there (sure it can look good, but this doesn't im sorry... but it's the truth)

You're current site design rocks, you just need to tweak it not remove large chunks of images.

If you're worried about load times, you may want to remove the amount of jsfiles you have. firebug is telling me it takes 11.5secs to load the whole site for the first time (and 5.5secs of that is the JS alone ffs)

Dont remove the images, just minimilze youre JS and remove stuff you dont need, AND try to put all the javascript into one file (saves loads of different requests).

If i was to see this site now, I would be put off by it.

Firstly, why wasn't the msgstuff staff shown this before the rest of the world?

Secondly, I don't like it. It kind of looks like the first versions of msgstuff, back when you had only started making websites. I've seen what you can do, and this is far from your best .

Use the space provided by the browser. Don't leave loads of white space. You can also still have a simple header that looks better. Just have a small logo idea, and a repeating background gradient of some sort with a 1 px width. That won't kill the loading time, and it'll look better.

The new top navbar doesn't match anything. It looks like a modified version of google ads to be frank.

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Originally posted by Dempsey
Maybe make the news post title link to the single post.

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Definitely. This is a feature that's almost required for websites with news posts. Whenever I go to a website, I actually expect the post titles to link to a page for the articles. I'm still not used to having to click the comments/permalink thing for msgstuff's posts.

The top navbar, if used at all, should have a link to the forums, and be setup in the same exact way as the forum's and vice versa (i.e: same links.. integrate everything in the same exact way).

If possible, the new share button under each post should have seperate little buttons to directly share to the most popular websites (i.e: 1 little facebook logo, 1 del.icio.us logo, etc, 3-4 of these, and when clicked on, they go directly there instead of opening the menu. Then have another button that says "More...").

Integrate the tags more into the posts. Right now, they're only on the posts' specific pages. Have them on the main page as well.

Cut down on the javascript. We don't need that much.

The ads shown there, are they the only ones that are going to be there? If not, show us the rest, if so, good job . And give us our part.....


That's about it for now.

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Originally posted by .Lou
Firstly, why wasn't the msgstuff staff shown this before the rest of the world? (Smilie)

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They were, I was, chris was... but you're not always there - I had that problem ages ago with my site

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Originally posted by Nathan

quote:

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Originally posted by .Lou
Firstly, why wasn't the msgstuff staff shown this before the rest of the world? (Smilie)

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They were, I was, chris was... but you're not always there - I had that problem ages ago with my site

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Unlike you, we're usually more organized. We have forums for this kinda of stuff. Also, like I told you MILLIONS upon MILLIONS of times, email does still exist.

quote:

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Originally posted by .Lou

quote:

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Originally posted by Nathan

quote:

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Originally posted by .Lou
Firstly, why wasn't the msgstuff staff shown this before the rest of the world? (Smilie)

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They were, I was, chris was... but you're not always there - I had that problem ages ago with my site

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Unlike you, we're usually more organized. We have forums for this kinda of stuff. Also, like I told you MILLIONS upon MILLIONS of times, email does still exist.

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Yeah msgstuff is a team, skoolfun wasn't really a team, it was me, me, and you and chris but none of you really bothered about it (Don't blame you it was the world's crappiest site )

Ok seeing as Ross didn't mention it, it was me who designed this. What he coded however, is sort of a "hybrid" between the old site and my concept

Anyway, I have continued working on rearranging things a bit more and making it look (hopefully) more attractive and stylish. I should probably show him this first but meh, here is the updated, almost completely different, concept image:



Still a few things to do with it, and probably a few more by the time I wake up to your constructive criticism *hint*

* Eljay goes to bed now

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Originally posted by absorbation
I have a 40% bounce rate. That's ridiculous

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I've seen worse TBH.

quote:

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Originally posted by Eljay
Ok seeing as Ross didn't mention it, it was me who designed this. What he coded however, is sort of a "hybrid" between the old site and my concept

Anyway, I have continued working on rearranging things a bit more and making it look (hopefully) more attractive and stylish. I should probably show him this first but meh, here is the updated, almost completely different, concept image:



Still a few things to do with it, and probably a few more by the time I wake up to your constructive criticism *hint*

* Eljay goes to bed now

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Now that is much better. All of the actual design can be done in 2-3 images, the rest can be css. That's far from excess images, and it looks quite a bit better. Strangely enough, when I wrote earlier, I had in my mind set a design I had seen by you that worked quite well. Can't remember now, but anyway, what a coincidence.