A New Look

[Dianne Lewandowski]

I've been designing new websites for clients and decided to learn a little about SMF and Themes and their coding.    But I will add, through this process, I learned *very* little about coding under the hood, and more about using Photoshop.  Anyway, you may see a change or two over the next day or so.  Then again, maybe not! All depends on how well my brain is working at any given time.   

[MusicallyInspired]

Holy slick forum designs, Batman!

[Dianne Lewandowski]

I want to make it clear that I *did not* make this design.  It is a theme (skin).  I've redone a few for other sites, but not this one.  It was beautiful just the way it is   

There may be a change in the links to add a Home Page link if I can figure out how, and the logo may change to reflect the site name.

Thanks for the compliment, though.   

[Marten]

It looks nice at first...

My only concerns are:

(1) The "Show unread posts since last visit" and "Show new replies to your posts" links, now on the left, are not at all obvious as links and it is a little difficult to click on the desired one because they're placed so close together.

(2) I'm not really a fan of any skin that renders unusable part of the horizontal screen real estate all of the time.  I much prefer the search, news, and stats be up at the top, not at the left (or the right).  I prefer that persistent columns in any web design contain only elements to which I will want continuous access.  :shrug:

I can live with this though.  I see that as I increase the browser size, the column on the left doesn't look so overwhelmingly large.  (I normally run my browser not-maximized, which is sort of like running at 800x600... so when I first brought up the website the empty space took about 1/4 of the horizontal screen.   

[Laust]

Marten beat me to it. The new sidebar is empty execpt at the top and only serves to eat up space. I'd favour a layout without it, as well.

Doesn't SMF allow multiple themes installed, as a user-definable setting? other boards allow that. Then the conservative among us could stick to the old one

[Ari]

As Marten and Laust pointed out, it is a little bit of a waste of space, but other than that, it really looks good!

[Tom]

You do have the option (in your Profile) to change the board layout back to the old "Quest Studios" theme ... and a couple of other theme options.  (This wasn't previously enabled.)

My first concerns after seeing this new layout was with the narrowed usable posting area.  However, I was looking at it on Dianne's screen, which is a standard 4:3 monitor.  It's fine on a wide-screen monitor, which I believe is becoming more the norm these days.  Plus, simply collapsing the 'side-bar' (click on the little arrow) gives you a full screen layout with no waste.

[Dianne Lewandowski]

Yep . . . just collapse that left area using the little arrow and you've got the width of your screen to work with.

The old board had the same difficulty in the same area (news, stats) you're talking about:  links were just a line apart.  So there's no change there.  Isn't it amazing that - even though you do something frequently - you forget what you've seen before?

By having the stats and news at left, you are eliminating a lot of clutter at the top and it makes for less scrolling when replying or looking at new posts in different topics.  I'm redesigning a client's forum and one of the themes I looked at truly had a *lot* of clutter at the top.  I have a test site, so I uploaded a lot of new skins to see what worked and what didn't.  I tried hard not to look at colors, but just to look at how I wanted it to be used.  That's not easy.  Some of these skins really shout at you with color or mood. . . especially those designed for moody or war-like boards.

[Marten]

OOH!  That helps lots   I completely didn't realize that arrow would collapse the sidebar.

That only leaves my very minor nitpick of having to use ninja skills to hit the "Show unread posts since last visit" link instead of "Show new replies to your posts." 

Thanks!

[mace]

After posting in a thread, I get dumped back into the forum instead of the thread, is there an option to disable this behavior?

Edit: found it... 

[Dianne Lewandowski]

I'm shouting from the rooftops up here in northern Wisconsin.

I've been working with a coder at SMF.  He had given me a suggestion, it didn't work.  I noticed that it didn't look like any of the other links, so I didn't think it would work.  But, I tried it anyway.

It didn't work.

Then he gave me another suggestion.  I had already tried it on my own from seeing how the rest was coded. 

It didn't work.  But I was happy to know that at least my brain was on the right track.

Just now, he looked further under the hood and I learned a *whole bunch*.  He gave me the code to insert into a language folder in the default board (all smf sites have a "default").  When I saw that, I knew I was on the right track.

I inserted it.l  Uploaded a new theme php file and voila!

You now have a "Site Home" button.  Not sure if Tom will like the title, but if not, I know how to change it!

Can ya hear me shouting "Yippee!"  Must not be too loud.  Parker is asleep under my feet.

[Caliburn]

To start with, let me say that I quite like the "slick" look of the Amber theme, and if a few changes are made, I'd be happy to have it as my theme of choice.  Also, it's always nice to see the Quest Studios Message Board get some tender loving care, so thanks to Dianne for working on this makeover.

It's great that users can choose between themes, so I think we should allow ourselves some leeway to make fairly drastic changes to the layouts of the different themes, since people can select what is most functional or appealing for them.  We don't need to restrict ourselves to simple changes of color, button appearance, images, etc.

However, I have some hesitations about Amber as the default theme unless at least two and quite possibly three considerable modifications are made to it.  Before I explain the two or three modifications needed (they've already been mentioned in fact), it might help if I explain where I'm coming from in my thinking.

I believe new users may not be aware that they can change the theme or, even if they are aware, they may not do so until they really settle in and start playing around with their settings.  Personally, when I join a new forum that has themes, I tend to stick with the default unless I really make a home there.  Although I imagine our users are probably pretty tech savvy on the whole, we also shouldn't dismiss the possibility that some users will never even realize that they have the power to change the theme if they would prefer something else.

So, although it isn't possible (and now, thankfully, it is no longer necessary) to do one thing that pleases everyone, I think we do have some obligation to make a judgment call that the default theme be as intuitive, functional, and pleasing as it can be to the greatest number of users, especially the less tech savvy ones.

With this in mind, I think the number one problem with the Amber theme currently (at least if used as a default theme) is that not all the links are clearly designated as links.  I realize that it has become increasingly the trend in web design to do away with underlining of links and find some other way of making it clear that they are clickable.  This is an aesthetically pleasing trend which I have nothing against in principle.  But the important part is that the underlining be compensated for in some other way (arrangement of the text, different color, etc.).

It's sufficiently obvious, for example, that things like HOW DO I REGISTER? are clickable, even without the underlining, because of the arrangement and the bold.  And Amber still underlines links that people put in their posts, so no problem there.  What it does not do, and I think should do, is mark things like "X messages", "Show unread posts since last visit" and "Show new replies to your posts" in some manner (underlining, bold, different color) that make it clear these are clickable.  (The previous Quest Studios theme underlined them, which probably has more to do with Marten's remark than the spacing between them.)  As it is, you can't tell they are links until you run the mouse over them, at which point they turn blue.  Someone who has been using QSMB won't be much troubled by this, so we are all bad judges.  We should assume a new user, and I can only imagine someone going, "Oh, I have 1 message, now how do I get to it?", because the clickable text "1 message" is not marked in any way.

I assume this isn't limited to the three bits of text I've mentioned, but has to do with some kind of global category into which these bits of text fall--unlike, say, links within a post, which fall into a different category, and therefore get underlined.

The second thing I think absolutely should be changed before I can really feel good about this as a default theme is something Mace hit on.  The theme should probably not be set to take people back to the homepage after they post, but instead back to the thread they posted in.  I think people, by and large, like to see that their post went through.  An individual user can fix this by going to Profile --> Look and Layout Preferences and putting a checkmark in the box "Return to topics after posting by default," but again we should be assuming a user who won't ever look at these settings, so this should be set by default for such a user.  I would add to Mace's comment that "Show most recent personal messages at top" should also be checkmarked by default, to bring it in line with the previous Quest Studios theme, and to ensure that the user does not wonder where his or her newest PM is.  (Someone who prefers it at the bottom at least won't have trouble finding it, and can then go and change his or her settings to suit this personal preference.)

One more change, not absolutely necessary, but in my opinion strongly recommended, would be to put the new sidebar information back up top.

To be clear, I think there should be a theme with this new sidebar.  I just don't personally think it ought to be the default, though I admit there might be more room for debate here than there is with the two things I mentioned above.  The problem with putting this stuff on the side in a default theme is that it might confuse a new user.  As soon as you click on your Profile, for example, notice that you effectively get two sidebars (unless of course, you've already chosen to collapse the Amber sidebar).  Besides the new Amber-theme sidebar (the info that used to be on top), there is, of course, the old SMF sidebar (that contains the controls you need to access different settings in your profile).  Due to its functions, this old SMF sidebar is by far the more important of the two sidebars for the user to notice at this point in time.

If you watch someone who is smart and has been using computers for years, but nevertheless does not have 100% facility with the Internet because of all the different layouts used on different websites--someone like my mother, for example, bless her heart--I will bet you dollars to donuts that such a user will not immediately notice the Profile sidebar, because it is now sandwiched between the Profile page proper and the new Amber-theme sidebar.  (I hope I am describing this in a way that is clear.)

Therefore I highly recommend that two versions of Amber be created: One without the sidebar, placing the info therein back on top (to use as a default) and one with the sidebar (to be selected by individual users who prefer this).

I have no idea what programming is involved to make Amber move the new sidebar back up top, so if it is necessary to do this from a different theme that is very similar to Amber but has the old topbar instead of a sidebar, then maybe that's the best way to go about it.

These are the three things that struck me as important for new users, so I hope they will be considered.  I don't know much of anything about web design, so I'm sorry I can't give much advice on how to implement these things.

Thanks again for all your time and effort!

-Luke

Mostly unrelated side note: Now that people can choose their theme, I noticed that two of the options, the Classic YaBB SE theme and the Babylon theme, were not loading correctly, because the Admin settings had designated the wrong directory in which the files were supposedly located.  So I corrected these two directories and they now load properly.  This should be basically irrelevant to what you're doing, but I figured I'd mention it since you're working behind the scenes.

[Caliburn]

I had three more thoughts, so I'm back--as if you hadn't heard enough of my yapping yet

These are totally minor, though, so I'd focus on the post above this.

1) If you agree with my advice about moving this new sidebar back up top for the default theme (in order to be less confusing to new users when the extra SMF sidebar shows up), then even so, this restored topbar needn't be like the old one.  It could be collapsible as this new sidebar is, so that people who feel it clutters up the top of the page can hide it.  That'd be fabulous.

2) Assuming there remains a second theme that people can choose which gives them the option of a sidebar instead of a top bar, I had a wishful thinking idea about it.  The new Amber-theme sidebar would be more useful if it would travel down the page when you scroll, so that it's always at the upper left corner of the screen even when you scroll down, instead of stuck at the top of the page.  I kind of doubt the SMF software is this sophisticated, but it's worth asking about.  That way people can access its features, collapse or expand it, all without scrolling back up to the top of the page.

3) "Site Home" is probably a clear enough name for your new button.  The only other thing I could think of was '"Main Website" or something like that.

-Luke

[Dianne Lewandowski]

We're taking all your thoughts to heart.  Unfortunately, I'm designing two other web sites with forums, galleries, etc., plus trying to learn a bit about WordPress and Joomla.  So for the next couple of weeks, I'm buried.

But we appreciate very much the comments and will give it a more thorough examinations to see what can and cannot be done with this particular theme.  Personally I never use the Stat or the "show unread . . ." on any of my sites.  Clutter to my taste.  Who cares.  Just get to the meat and potatoes.  I *do* like the news feature.

That being said:  once you log in and check the left area, do you really need to ever look at it again?

[Tom]

Just a couple of things, real quick before I have to leave for work...

Return to topics after posting by default.

This is only a User Profile option, not an administrative option, no matter what theme is displayed.

I guess I've overlooked the non-obvious links problem; I've figured that the wording makes these "obvious links".

Upon registration, I instruct every NEW user to immediately go to their User Profile to update their temporary password, and anything else they want.  I could provide a little more detailed information in the 'Welcome' letter, but I doubt that would help.  A lot of people don't read instructions, which is obvious by my receiving so many registration requests which don't include a desired User Name.

When I look at the Amber theme on Dianne's 4:3 monitor, the 'sidebar' issue does seem to have merit.  But on my widescreen monitor, I simply don't even notice it.  Now, I understand a lot of people are using lower resolutions and 4:3 monitors so that this could be a problem...which is why there are alternative themes available.

I doubt that moving the sidebar will be possible; that's beyond our coding capabilities, and the theme was designed in this manner for a reason -- we could probably just offer more themes to alleviate this.

Anyway, all of these things will be looked at when we get back from our trip next week.  THANKS for all the feedback!


And Luke, one final side-note to you.  Do you see how my post shows me as Administrator -- but only shows 10-eighth notes instead of all 12 notes?  Yours, Dianne's, Ari's all work correctly.  Do you have any idea why mine doesn't?  Strange.

Go Cubs!