I have finished an update regarding the website design.
Now, you may ask “why bother?” or “what was wrong with the old design?”. Well, there was nothing terribly wrong with it, but it didn’t really make use of the space properly, which I think the new design does slightly better (although it is still far from being optimized).
I also thought that the text could have a larger line spacing to make it easier to read. Tell me if it looks better in your eyes as well.
The main reason for the change, however, is that integrating a forum into the old design was too difficult. The new design, meanwhile, allows for more horizontal space to be used without the website looking odd on smaller resolutions, which in turn means that the launch of a discussion forum should not be in very distant future.
Looking good on my PC in Firefox and IE. I ususally prefer a more compressed text but I do like the expanded version here. Works well.
It should work fine on Firefox, latest Opera as well as IE 5.5+. I have no idea about non-Windows environments, though.
Looks decent. Not a huge fan of the text on the left (I find it easier to read things in the center at the computer) but if that means a forum is in the works, I am happy.
I am very cool with the update. Great job!
Are you implying that the forum would be on the left side of the screen?
Right now am on a 24″ wide screen monitor and Firefox 2, the entire sites uses only 40% of the real-estate, the middle and right are completely blank, excluding the top header. When not full screen or on a non-wide screen monitor it appears fine, but the left basis it a bit odd.
Not a complaint, am fine with any changes, especially when a possible forum is in the works.
Following idyllopus‘s comment, I have made the line height a bit smaller. I think it looks a bit more decent now.
Ben – I agree about the centring, and will be looking into it. It was a bit of a problem for me as well, but now that you mentioned it, I can’t think of anything else! Fortunately, the present code is quite a bit more modifiable than what the previous one was, so I should be able to play around.
Jeremy – It’s a bit difficult to design for a screen as wide as yours (I suppose your resolution is around 2000 pixels horizontally?). But I’ll see if I can do something to make the site look at least somewhat more decent on your screen. Could you perhaps send me (vili.maunula[at]google.com) a screenshot of what you get, so that I can try to work on it?
Jeremy – I did something that ought to make the site look better on your browser widths. Please let me know what it looks like at your end now!
Thanks Vili, it works perfectly now.
My resolution is 1920 x 1200, I didnt take a real screen shot because since it works I didnt think there is any reason to do so now.
Excellent, thanks for the shot. Glad to hear that what I did worked out well. The old design must really have looked terribly silly on your monitor, though!
I will still need to come up with a solution for the login/logout text that currently goes to the top left corner of the screen, and doesn’t align nicely with the rest of the site when you have more than 1010 horizontal pixels in your use.