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B is for Beta ...

B is for Beta ...

On the home front, last weekend I spent some time upgrading my web server. For anyone that has visited our site, it was previously running on a 233MHz machine, with 96Mb of RAM and a 60Gb hard drive, using a seperate IDE channel for the 5Gb (physical) swap disk - those of you who know these specs will probably reel back in shock at the lowness of them, but for the couple of personal sites we run, this has sufficed for the last 8 years or so.

The new machine in a HP e-PC, a small form computer which fits nicely in an alcove in the study, and upgrades the site to 733MHz with 256Mb of RAM, with a single 120Gb HD. I think this will hum along for the next few years with no drama - after all, the slowest point is our ADSL connection.

The upgrade was quite easy; a fresh install of Linux Fedora Core 6 (even though 7 was released, I couldn't find a suitable copy), using the "rsync" command to copy the web sites across, setting up "crontab" and "samba" were surprisingly quick - the only problem I ran into was when I previously configured "samba" I had used a "force group" directive for files copied across to give access to the webserving user. It caused a few scatches of the head.

Anyhow, with the new server in place, I've been feeling inspired to update the (gasp) 5 year old framed design on my wesite (if you haven't seen it: http://neophytte.mine.nu). Although at the time frames seemed cool, they now feel dated and don't work properly with IE7, as well as a couple of other browsers (it seems the "target" frame is now depreciated). I've been toying with a few javascript driven "web2" type designs (see my recent site http://routedtrack.hobby-site.com/) with it's fading in and out buttons on the left, something I quickly replicated on our wedding/honeymoon site (http://richardeunice.myphotos.cc/) with less impact.

But for the main site I've been looking at getting away from my black/white/shades of grey that seem to replicate in my designs, and came up with this assymetrical site - http://neophytte.mine.nu/html/index2.html. The left hand side changes the photo and the "Archived Sets" on a nightly basis, and the content changes ad hoc, as per the main page of the site now.

I'm not convinced it's the next big thing. so was looking for some feedback ...

Cheers

Richard

Posted by richardm on Jul 04, 2007 in Blab | 9 comments

anti on Jul 04, 2007

There are actual designers on this forum, and even though I found the new design nice and clean, I am not gonna pretend to know design.

What I do want to tell you (and them) is that I surf without JavaScript enabled for security reasons. I can enable it when I choose, for example for this site, but if I am not highly motivated I will leave. If the intended audience is people who know you or the script is not essential for navigation, then you are fine.

Congratulations on the nuptials!

JBVisions on Jul 05, 2007

Ooooo frames! Yucky yucky spit spit. Good move getting rid of them.

My immediate comment when hitting your page is it's clean and easy to use but the logo is much too close to the top of the page. Bring it down. Whitespace is good.

Thought you were getting away from white and grey?

zelda013 on Jul 05, 2007

well, it seems you're off to a good start. since you want feedback, here is my opinion. i agree with JB : frames = bad ! very good you got rid of that. and, whitespace = good ; your logo is suffocating there. speaking of the logo... the grey logo with the kkaki background of the page seems a bit surprising (especially if you want to get away from grey), and the style of the logo doesn't really seem coherent with the style of the rest of the page. hey ! now you have a pretext for a new logo design ! yay ! Given the style of the rest of the page, you could even try a very pure text-based logo, with no effects. that would go with the clean look.

the new layout is definitely nice and clean, easy to understand, information is presented in a way that makes sense.

as far as design, if you're going to use strong colors as your content background, perhaps a paler shade from the same palette for the page background ? the pure white seems a little stark, in contrast.

the palette of colors you have chosen work well together, but maybe you could try warming them up to match the sepia tones of the photo ; this would make the photo much more a part of the page design. you can just use the eyedropper tool in photoshop (or the ColorZilla extension for firefox ; i love that thing) to click on different parts of the photo until you find a set of colors you like, and you are sure they will complement the photo, because they are from it. the background in particular (middle tone) seems too green next to the photo. but i may be biased there, since i'm not a huge fan of khaki...

in the new layout, i like the repeated centered 4 over 2 thumnail disposition ; much more interesting than 3 over 3 (or 4 over 4), it makes a nice motif. and i like the what you have integrated the photo in top of your left column.

well... that was a lot of comments ! i hope you don't mind, it's only intended as constructive. let us know if you make any changes !

richardm on Jul 08, 2007

Thanks for your comments - it surprised me that no-one had many negative comments on the new design, so I'm plodding along with this. Just to adddress a couple of bhits from the comments:

anti> I surf without JavaScript enabled for security reasons

Good point! I've addressed this by converting the page to a PHP and dropping the datafile in a database (whereas it was a flat file before).

JBV> the logo is much too close to the top of the page.

Yep, that logo was a hangover from the other design, trying to squeeze it in so I didn't have to do a redesign, please see link below...

zelda> i like the repeated centered 4 over 2 thumnail disposition ; much more interesting than 3 over 3 (or 4 over 4), it makes a nice motif.

Hmmm, thanks - this came about by accident as the previous design was 6 thumbnails in a line, with the decreased size they just naturally wrapped at the fourth.

Anyhow, the design probable looks the same, this weekend was dumping stuff in databases, fixing code, etc, but the logo changed to a text based one and a few other minor changes. You can see this here:http://neophytte.mine.nu/html/index3.php

My wife is complaining I haven't spent enough time with her, so updates may a bit slower now ...

richardm on Jul 29, 2007

In case anyone is still foloowing this thread, I've finalized the design, fixed the PHP bugs and put it up as the live front page:

http://neophytte.mine.nu/

4 years and 364 days to the next design ;)

Richard

anti on Jul 29, 2007

Awesome! really

zelda013 on Jul 30, 2007

oh, very nice ! i particularly like the way you treated the logo ; very elegant.

richardm on May 23, 2008

Coming up for a year onwards and I've added some extra smarts like 404 errors get directed to a faux front page with a search facility; all entries to the photo part get logged to the forum for people to comment (as the comment script was/is gettign bombarded by SPAM!). Umm, a few other things that I've already forgotten (as it's a home project) ;)

Denise on May 23, 2008

Very Nice!