OMFG, what have you done? As you see, we've made a few changes to the Reg look and feel this week, and we expect numbers of you to go off on one (or indeed two or three). So before you do, we feel the need to assure you that it's all still there. No really, it is - it just looks a little different. So where is it? Current stories remain the core of the …
I'm running at an insane res on a laptop and I'm getting two huge grey bars down either side of the site. Looks awful and it's a terrible waste of space. Can we come to a compromise and make use of the full screen when reading a story at least? Shoot the mac-wielding graphics types if you must...
fixed width? you suck.
new icons for comments? you suck more
everything else? i dont give a shit
fixed width? it is the single most moronic idea *ever* - the pinnacle of terrible web design. now, half my screen is devoted to some grey background instead of text. Now i have to scroll more, read less. you have removed from me the choice of how i want to display my stuff. I am removing you from my bookmarks, seriously. It is a point of principle for me to not use any fixed-width designed sites. its like.. geocities design.
I will give the changes time, but to me, it looks like a sell-out. The ads all became bigger, and the available space to search for stories became smaller, and with much more need to scroll. A bit of a bother, and I will have to use my other news sites more often till I get used to the new format. The new icons for comments are also way too cute, in a bad way.
New design, new layout bugs.
Fire up Opera v9.52 and you'll find the little icons for "Print", "Comment" and "RSS" are breaking free and running riot.
Well, they ain't in the right place on my screen... but maybe I am just drunk?
(Oh - and I had to laugh... but it also fails this... http://validator.w3.org/check )
I'm not keen on the new comment icons, which are a bit characterless (especially the Paris Hilton one). Also, it's a shame we can't see the first few comment titles any more - I used to use those to help decide whether to open the comments page.
Otherwise, the new organisation seems promising. All the whiteness is a bit stark, though.
I had a premonition you would go all web 2.0.
I don't know, it's alright, not the same though :)
It feels a little contrived, sort of like a designer without a passion for the site did it. Ok, I suppose, but you did have something different before.
And I would like to point out, that it worked on 800 width (in fact I think it was flexibile) now it doesn't.
Still it is your site, and it looks like it has been done well, there is nothing wrong per se.
Oh well, end of an era.
Congratulations on the new look! From what I've seen so far, it's great (and gets rid of most of my personal niggles). The reduction in headline font size is a very good idea, and makes the whole site a lot more usable. The whole layout looks considerably more professional and a lot slicker. Well done!
PS. Not so sure about the icons though...
It doesn't seem to be too bad here so far. It'll take a bit of getting used to, so I guess final judgement is reserved for a week or so. I'm not normally a fan of fixed width, but you seem to have chosen something just slightly narrower than my default browser size so it fits OK.
Interesting set of icons on this one :-)
Hoorah for Double Dekkers. Well said that man!
Boo for fixed width, it's several steps backwards. As screen resolutions INCREASE you decide to DECREASE the area used!?
Icons are a disappointment but at least there could be a case for simplification unlike the decision for fixed width.
Yes, I suppose you can be excused for restyling the vulture, commended for some of the new style icons, but let me award you a new style flame for going to fixed width pages.
One of the great advantages of HTML formatting as it was first set out has been the control the reader gets over the width, typesize and font face in use. I suppose that you are not entirely to blame, for you could not have used it if someone else had not provided it. But just because you could turn El Reg into an impression of a pdf didn't mean that you had to! Please find some excuse to go back to variable width in a few days.
In the mean time, does anyone know how to get Firefox and/or Proxomitron to change fixed width to variable width pages?
Something seems to be fixed, the comment text isn't deleted ny more. Is thiis because I entered a title before the comment whereas previously I typed the comment first and then the title?
The default font is too small.
The new icons are _nasty_. What is the one after the green apple anyway? For that matter what is the one before the green apple? Or the red triangle with three dots, what is that? Why are all but the thumbs up/down very stylised? Where are the devils and angels. This is a web page so, why not 64 or more different icons?
OK, I can see the logic (hey, I actually *read* the article!) and the only thing that bogs me is the fixed width of, what? 800? It feels claustrophobic, frankly, especially since the side panels have to somehow fit in as well.
So you're right, I'm hereby handing you stick for the fixed width. For the rest I can see what you're trying to do and it would be unfair to yell at you yet, I have to use it for a while first (translated: I may still in a week from now, though :-)
And I liked the old icons MUCH more..
I understand about missing stories, and the time zone thing, hell, it really is an improvement this way, but why make it so damn ugly? The front page may have been everchanging, and cluttered but at least you could see what was going on, albeit after some marginal practice.
Seems like deisgn for the sake of design. Hell, this new comment form too, why did that need changing? I'll give you a fiver to bring the old way back, if only as an opt-in thing.
It looks just fine, guys (and gals—musn't forget the Divine Moderatrix!).
As for the masthead typeface (not font, dough-heads: there's a significant difference), when doesn't El Reg run a contest for the masthead design, and let those of us with thousands of font files squirreled away play with them? I'll leave selection of a suitable prize up to your devious minds.
One glaring flaw: no man from mars icon! At first I thought the IT? icon was it, misreading it as M for Mars, but no, I was sorrowfully disappointed in this continued failure to cater to the true needs of your readers. Perhaps you could automagicallhy attach a suitable MfM icon to his(her?) postings?
I'm using Opera 9.6 and I cannot type anything in the email, password, or title fields of the comment box! This means I can't actually make comments using Opera!! Please fix this!!
Also one more thing, not everything is still there! Where are the links to Reg Hardware and Channel Register?
The redesign seems fine except for, as others have mentioned, the fixed bloody width.
I don't dislike the colour grey, particularly, but nor do I enjoy having almost half of my (1680) screen constantly showing it to me. Having to look at this greyness is going to make me feel depressed eventually!
Also startled at first (did I click the wrong bookmark, wtf? oh wait, it IS the Register...), but I do like the general change in the looks. IMNSHO, more pleasant and easier on the eyes, with the grey bars.
But to echo the general choir, *fixed width is so 20th century*, please... As I said, I like the grey sides, but they are quite largish in my bigger, widescreen home monitor. I could use with less scrolling, I'm sure. I'm guessing they will look fine at work (smaller, 4x3 screen), will see tomorrow.
Oh, yeah, and the icons are appalling, really. Really, really. What is this, an IT for kids website? It looks like someone's child spent 10 minutes using Windows paint to draw them. I had to look at the alt text of some of them to even recognize what they were to begin with. The old ones were much better graphics and had personality.
I'm a long-time lurker, loyal for years, and I'm horrified by this god-forsaken mess.
What used to look like a proper professional journal now looks like a cheap nasty tabloid.
Way to go guys - you just doubled your advertising space, and halved the value of it...
I hope you're proud.
We'll check the 9.6 issue. We got rid of the old links to Reg Hardware and Channel Reg because they were relatively little used. Go down the page and you'll see bigger, alternative jumping off points for both, plus BOFH. This is experimental, by the way. We'll be checking stats on what works and what doesn't, and modifying in light of that data.
We'll also likely start running links from the grey strip under the nav bar below the masthead. This is occupied by the subsections on the section pages, but on the front page we're looking at how we could make it more fluid. Reg Hardware, Channel and BOFH would be obvious chandidates for inclusion there. And we'll be running links to specials in both of them in the right hand column, so they ought to be better promoted than they were in the old look. That's the intention, anyway.
Now the new layout isn't as criminally bad as 'New' Farcebook ("Oooh ... look at the cute things we can do with CSS!") but can we please, *please* have the old icons back? There's a time and a place for gratuitous cuteness, and I don't think El Reg is either.
Irrespective of what happens, we still need a 'Meh!' icon IMO.
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... but the fixed width sucks. Curiously unlike other posters who are complaining it being too narrow for me it's barely wide most of the time. Which illustrates the point equally well.
Good news about going back to having stories in posting order though: the previous method confused the hell out of me and I was missing stories.
(And at the risk of being drummed out of the regiment I''d have been happy if you'd dumped the posting icons completely - the Paris meme had long since worn a little thin and the others were just a waste of bandwidth and screen space.)
How about:
- "view comments" link from the TOP of the article.
- a "view article on single page" option so that I can just load it and read, rather than paging through each page or selecting "printer friendly" but losing the easy-to-read screen layout.
And the new icons for comments are pants. They look like 1990's free clipart that someone stole from somewhere. Bring back the old ones, damnit.
If El Reg would like to get more ad revenue, perhaps they should consider dropping ads which require flash or javascript to view. I don't use an adblocker - after all, the fine people at El Reg and various other sites I use need to eat, too - but I do run noscript, which kills just about every ad on theregister.co.uk. What's more, I absolutely will not poke holes in my security for someone else's benefit, and considering that this site has a highly technical audience, I can't imagine I'm the only one in this position.
Other than that: I hate the new design, change is bad, I'll get used to it. :)
-Daniel
Fixed width? Boo! I now have probably a quarter of the screen width filled with "RISC OS 2 desktop grey" on my modestly sized monitor. Some of the layout also behaves oddly in Firefox 2.x such that "Your email address is never published" runs over the edge of the box.
There's not much else to complain about. Apart from the sanitised icons, of course. ;-)
um - who is this icon? it's not Paris that's for sure. Actually the overall look of the icons isn't too bad, but since the old ones had become so well um, familiar, some of the changes are BAD. Rest of it looks clean enough and when you change it again in 5 yrs we'll be bleating about how much we loved it all over again....
I still have an old page or two open in my browser. And the font shrinkage is very noticeable. The site is a lot less comfortable to read on a 24" wide screen. And I second the guys who are mentioning the fixed width. This is now making the News Items and the Comments too small on the screen compared with all the "sponsored links" and "Reg Jobs" on the side.
I'm going to be forever magnifying your pages so my senile old eyes can read them. Not what I expected from an improved design. :-)
(And it seems daft, but this site now seems much whiter and brighter. Probably the thin, weedy font. This is going to play havoc on the eyes. Ever done any of these HSE courses on eye strain? I can see that as being a bonus in some ways... I need to cut down on the amount of El'Reg I read :))
Good to see the REAL icons still in use on the postings. :) And overall the site still looks good - just o tiny....
Ultimately - who cares what it looks like as long as the quality article stays the same. :)
Overall not bad. I like the classical three columns for the articles - kind of what gives el reg its character - but can see things need to evolve so fair enough...
I have to agree about the fixed-width complaints. It really doesn't cater for those with a widescreen resolution. At 1920 x 1200 (yes I've got a flashy monitor) literally half the screen is dead space.
If you have to have fixed width - why not fix width the feature side bar, but not the main body section. At least then more stories will appear on the front page (which I'd prefer) and more importantly the articles would not require endless scrolling. This is the main bug bear.
I know it sounds like a rant, but what's the point in having higher resolutions if we're forced to stick with narrow pages?
Pros:
Easier to get back to the main stories from sub-sections (Halloooo Hardware).
More stuff packed in.
Cons:
In this age of widescreen monitors, you choose a fixed-width? Could've bucked the trend and gone for horizontal scrolling on the front page...
The Header image looks like a local newspaper's attempt at emulating the red-top gutter press.
The icons look like they were designed by an out of work primary school teacher.
Change usually turns out to be a good thing, but the site looks like the bastard lovechild of DailyTech and The Inquirer. Was it designed by committee?
Otherwise how else can we quickly surf to the reg and have a good laugh?
Oh dear - the new Paris Angle. Either someone got a pack of lawyers letters or she had a make over to improve herself.... What have you done?
You outlook not so good icon should see some flames licking the flag - not a white space... or is it a hint at the fixed width issues?
Wheres the tinfoil hat icon? The blue bloke looks right - but wrong comment line.
And now with smaller text to make my poor eyes finally give up.
That said - like all Web2.0 things. Good ideas but implementation still needs tweaking (widths, text sizes, white spaces, PDF look alike).
The Inq has had the #2 slot in my links forever...I've watched the content shrink from year to year and this latest load of crap is the last straw!
Why report at all? Just fill your site with more and larger ads and tell us all to bugger off..kinda what you did eh?
Money,money,money
Dazzle the dumb sods and tell them how we changed our format just for THEM..I'm sure no one will notice that the Inq is now just an giant ad billboard with the content everyone has enjoyed for ages moved into the fine print.
"And did we mention we changed the masthead? And we switched to fixed width? We'll sure as hell catch it for that. OK, fire away"
With all your new ad money streams you could least hire a real programmer!
Or is the format change directed more towards those using Xbox and iPods...what a shame!!
My PFY is at this moment loading fuel in our glow-in-the-dark 50 gigawatt cattle prod..errr..knighting sword and I'm at this time buying tickets to cross the big pond and give you limeys the rewards you justly deserve.
As Simon would say...it's impossible to tell bosses/editors (or whatever moron that is in charge here) from a horses arse!
I hope you gave him a larger cut of the pie as his works are what make this mess bearable
Primetrouble
Las Vegas NV USA
Nice, good job, top hole and all that.
Just one thing though...the highlighted stories in the two and four boxes (grey backgrounds) don't change link colour when I've visited them. Makes it hard to remember if I've read them or not.
Also (okay, so that's two things) the fact that they are in a grey box makes them about 78% overlookable.
I for one, after first, as the title denotes, thinking "OMFG" actually quite like the new layout. I am currently using an AA1 so the width is suitable. I suspect I may be slightly less pleased later on when I use a widescreen but its nothing i'll lose sleep over. The icons are a bit disappointing, but ill live with it, maybe we could have some new ones sent in by Reg readers (presuming there are any left after this little act). I mean, what were you thinking El Reg, to spring this on your unsuspecting readers? Some of them do not like change, especially unforewarned change. Nevermind, onwards and upwards...
Most of the layout is generally familiar, I suppose the new graphical style will grow on the regular readers, but as long as I can still post utter toss in the comments sections and quality of the scribblers who send the articles in is still good, then I couldn't give a rats ass if the whole site was run through Upside Downterweb, It'll still be in my bookmarks.
Not a huge fan of the new icons for commenting though - some of the, shall we say, Reg Specific ones [Paris, geek, etc] are a bit indistinguishable from just a blonde secretary and the geek one, when it was the good old blue hazardous glasses one at least had a hint of bonffinry about it. Those two, specifically, reek of Web 2.0 MiniMeCartoonAvatar in the worst possible sense....
Sort it out, Reg artistic design chaps, or I'll delete my bookmark/drop your subnet/cry etc. ;-)
Steven R
I'm really not enamoured by the new look, and far prefer the old one.
And yes, the icons are sh*te, and when AC finishes with the barf-bag, i'd appreciate a go too.
I hope you've got an RSS feed, as sadly I don't think i'll be returning to this dogs' dinner of a site - which is a shame, as it's been my homepage default for at least 4 years.
I'd love to say sod it, i'm off to the Inq as well, but that's really gone downhill since Mike Magee left :-(
Guess this means we won't get anymore articles slagging web 2.0, utterly useless formless non-functional web and graphic design, eh? That'd be a bit hypocritical, considering you've apparently hired the blind and illiterate. What next, pacifists replacing Lewis Page?
To wit: Fuck you (and, by extension, the imdb and every other website that's redesigned itself poorly... which is nearly every website redesign ever in the whole of history that replaces a long-standing successful perfectly nice setup). I'm off to the Inquirer. They know fuck-all about computers but at least they aren't hypocritical fucknozzles.
Love,
Me
You've not fixed the biggest bug of all. Longer articles still get split over more than one page. This can't be a desired effect, surely!
I mean all of those of us using offline readers hate downloading only half an article (or 20% of a five-pager) on the train.
Sort it out, please. I'm sure your advertisers are already wise to the increased page-hits generated by multi-page articles ruse. No-one benefits.
An improvement in my view. A tad too 2.0 and colorful for me, but it's just a matter of time until y'all get bored with that as well.
The line spacing is still all over the place and indicative of MS-Office defaults. Do you actually enjoy reading anything that's so crammed together?
Keep it coming.
Not that you'll take any notice I suspect.
However, width is relevant because for physiological reasons, and narrow quite simply makes it easier to read (basic usability). Previously I'd resize the page, now it makes no difference. Variable width would satisfy all users.
BTW new icons are cheese incarnate, but that's tertiary at worst.
Otherwise, so far so good.
Oh, and I hope you haven't gone javascript mental cos many here will be running FF with noscript.
I normally get my El Reg fix via its RSS feed so do not normally get to see the main page. However, when a story is multi-page or I want to read the comments, I do have to go through the website.
For the most part, I like the changes, but do have a couple of criticisms as well.
I like the new banner. It feels more clean and you can fit more on the page.
Not too sure about the fixed width. I've never paid much attention to it before, and even tough I have a wide screen monitor, the grey bars down the side are not too hard on the eyes.
I do not agree with a previous comment that you should get rid of the comment icons, I think they add flavour to the comments. I would like to see more of a selection of icons though, like nationality flags (So I can attach a Canadian flag next to my comments). Also, I would like to see a male counterpart version of the Paris icon, to make things fair.
My only other critique is the comments. I liked being able to see the first few comments regarding a particular article. Often times, it helped me decide whether to read the other comments as well as to whether I wanted to leave my own comment, so would like to see that brought back.
Other than that, good job of the new look.
OK, I love the idea. If it ain't broke, fuc*k it up anyway...BOFH in 'charge' of the refit, by any chance?
But seriously, I preferred the above-mentioned previous icons, (actually, ALL the previous icons) but those ones gave me an easy choice.
"Paris", 'cos I'd like to get inside her knickers, but unfortunately, there's one arsehole in there already, and "amanfrommars", 'cos I'd reach for the Dispirin before I opened his comment.
And put the coffee down.
And the keyboard away.
Maybe feed the mouse to the cat.
Maybe even shut the fuc*ker down...and go to bed. First.
I've been wondering when El Reg would go into redesign mode - had to happen eventually. 50% of the time I read El Reg on a 10-yr-old old machine, with a REALLY old browser so I'm grateful that I still can. The only thing that's broken (so far) are the images of the comments' icons which have disappeared, except for a half-eaten apple floating about - the radio buttons are there though.
But the comments' icons are anodyne! No chararcter, style or individuality whatsoever. Definitely cutesy, more like a politically correct Walt Disney effort. Just re-instate the old ones!
As a sad old git with increasingly duff eye sight, I can only say that irrespective of the layout or whether the new site is better than the old, I can't read it easily because it's all too bloody small fonts, and yes I know I can change that to some extent but I've been reading the Reg for years without any problems so why should I have to?
I just tried writing a comment (this one) on my other computer with Opera 9.6 installed and it works fine!
On the original computer that I had problems with, the add comment form works properly if you click on "post a comment" beneath an article.
However, it does not work if you click to view comments and then use the form below all the comments.
On this machine, it works both ways :S
I tried reinstalling Opera on the other computer but no luck..
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Actually as screens get wider, not having every line of text 20 inches wide is a real advantage. Having an article look good when it's between 6 and nine inches wide is handy, wider than that and it gets difficult to read.
However, fixing the width to something just to wide to display on (insert gadget here) is a really bad idea. Given the Eee-fever that swept this place, did anyone even consider that some screens might be as small as 800x480? Oh wait, that's already implied by the fixed width.
However, I take my (suitably black and tinfoil-lined) hat off to anyone who can manage to read a column of 12pt text that runs the entire width of a 26inch monitor running at 1920X1200.
I have this inescapable feeling that fixed width sites imply that I haven't yet learned that all my windows don't have to be maximised
Hi there long time lurker and avid visiter. I had to register to voice my opinion on the changes.
If it was broke fix it. But the site so wasn't. It web 2.0 but ruined by not having old icons for a start. So many sites are going this way and a prime example is sky news. i used to go on there all the time and when they changed it and added adverts before news vids i was straight off the the bbc news site. Yes some people like change but the character of the site has gone now in my opinion. Will come and view but no where near as much now.
What were you thinking about the fixed width?
The new icons need lots of help since they are way too light and have no character.
The font seems harder to read or my eyes went bad in the last 24 hours.
The gray side bars have to go.
Other than that, welcome to the 1999 school of web design.
whats the difference? i cant see any of the "top stories" on the front page anyway - wtf? isnt the front page the top stories?
sticking 4 links at the bottom isn't good, means i gotta remember to go there. which i probably wont. you could always replace that "top stories" (wtf is that about) with those.
these new icons are not good. and worse - not as fun. did somebody finally threaten you with legal action for nicking images? maybe your designer could find the levels and hue/saturation filter in photoshop to stop these weak icons looking washed out... or is that the idea? so we don't notice as much?
Same as most of the above - fixed width looks absolutely perfect on my machine, but don't like it because I know that when I am using my eee I'll get irritated.
I also want some of the old comment icons back (the ones with real people on, such as Paris).
My main problem though is with the other commentators: does noone except for me have an issue with the Register hiring someone from a strategy boutique? I mean, I like consultants... I'm related to about 30 of them, but you are the last people I expected to hire one.
Oh, and can I have a "I'm not really happy or unhappy, and possibly even mildly confused" face and/or question mark?
Old layout was somehow odd, but way more distinctive :
I'd like to have back :
- bigger fonts for headlines
- comments icons!! ('specially "I'll get my coats" and the dead vulture)
- site header
Things worths keeping :
- tab pane with top stories
- other "banner sized" links to relevant stories
I won't remove you from my bookmarks, though.
Ignoring all the complaints about icons and such, my main complaint is that the main page requires so much vertical scrolling on this 1024x768 monitor. That wouldn't be such a problem if the most recent content was at the top, but these new middle and bottom strips mean you have to scroll down to the very bottom every time to check if there is new material. Giving visited links in these strips a different colour would certainly improve the issue, but if you're going to use so much scrolling I'm sure you could find the room to fit in all the day's news stories in chronological order.
At least as rendered in FF, this comments page is a perfect example of why it sucks so badly. 1 feature up the top, a 'special report' or two, an advert or two (and don't think we don't all know you will slowly fill this up more), and blank space for a kilometer. Hate it, and hate the extra scrolling required as a result even more.
Secondly, how about implementing some sort of comments system where you can see ones that have been highly rated on the main story page? Ads. Ah of course. Thankyou.
Otherwise good job... Oh and lastly, Paris because fuck the icons you pathetic-never-laid-teenage-melodrama jerkoffs.
I used to be able to read your site witrh Opera 8.54. Now, it's just a bunch of items lined up on the left side of the page, and very hard to scan. (I don' t use css.)
I tried using Firefox. It is brutally slow, even on high-speed DSL. MSIE 6.0 is much faster, but I hate using it. Too vulnerable.
You could do everything with plain old html. It would be fast, compatible with all browsers, and probably much easier to code. Why make it so complicated? Why not keep it as simple as possible?
Go ahead - start a trend.
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You're as bad as ebay.
Why do web designers always behave in this arrogant, user-hostile fashion? If a car designer was to do something equally daft, like putting the steering wheel in the boot, nobody would buy the cars.
There's only ONE correct width for the width of a web page, and that's the width of whatever window its currently being viewed in. The USER should determine the width of a page, not the web designer.
The icons look a bit fresher, and not "mixing up" the order of the articles should be an improvement. As to the rest ... we'll have to see.
but I can say right now without compunction that the new masthead is bloody horrible. Did someone actually come up with a brief saying "Yeah, we want it to look like something from a 1970s two-colour local newspaper, except with the kerning fucked about."? Yuck.
No icon 'cos they're shit as well, although I suppose they render better on machines with 256-colour monitors...
I visit the reg because of the content, not because it is pretty.
I can't say I *like* the new look, but I don't hate it either, I do think it could be improved though, and with this in mind I have to side with the fixed width complainers. Whoever thought that fixed-width was a good design idea probably also loves to use single-mouse-clicks to launch their applications.
This incarnation of The Reg is;
1. Not middle-aged friendly (font is too small)
2 "zooming in on the text" to cure #1 results in even less content on the page. (fixed width)
3 Does not allow the reader to effectively use their desktop resolution (fixed width)
4 Requires more scrolling to view the content (fixed width)
5 Has huge areas of grey negative-space on the left and right side of the page (fixed width)
6 Has teasers in the middle of the headlines (redundant redundant redundant).
Windows icon, because changing the user-experience is not necessairly a good thing to do.
...... fixed width is pants guys, and the icons are sh1te.
I can possibly live with the fixed width as I have a shite monitor but the icons MUST change.
And as someone said before, its pretty poor on you to change these icons after selling them on merchandise.
New site layout is an improvement, but the icons do not give the same character as the old ones.
Fix it guys..............
I think I see what you were trying to do , but it seems such a shame that to waste all the effort that the resolution fairies put into giving me a nice wide screen. Very retro though, looks like a badly adjusted CRT monitor. If this is what you were going for then all well and good, but were you? Really?
Other than that it looks cleaner so it's a good first draft. How about finishing it off before you unleash it next time?
Whilst i will admit that the old Reg site was a bit of a 3-legged pony and quite rightly has be led to the glue factory, i think the fixed width of the new site is unnecessarily restrictive and the 2 huge grey bars on my widescreen monitor are just plain ugly. Next the icons for the comments section are FUGLY in the extreme. They look like they were designed by a 10 year old with a drinking problem. Seriously, bring back the old and all will be forgiven! Oh and the new site banner is pretty meh too, the font's a bit too Daily Mail for my liking (thick and ugly if you were wondering).
All that aside i think the body of the site looks nice and readable, less a shotgun blast (or vomit splash) of stories everywhere, now much more newspapery :) The "Don't Miss" boxes could use a touch of colour too, grey is just so miserable a colour. And a better font.
Overall a 9/10 for effort but a 5/10 for results.
... do we still have our beloved Moderatrix to cower before? Hence the icon - I am in love with the voluptuous Mistress Stern and want to do the "have her baby" thing (in a truly sub way, natch) but with precautions against any actual babies which are, of course, a revoltingly smelly and noisy consequence of carelessness.
Having got that off my chest, so to speak (no sniggering at the back), I spose I'll get used to the Fæcesbook stylee (with the aid of Ctrl plus '+' for my failing old eyes). But I think fixed width is a tad retrogressive. Oh, and the new icons are a bit too comic-book for my taste - but I'm old enough to remember comments without icons. Ackshully, I'm so bleedin' old, I remember El Reg without comments at all.
Give me a few days to familiarise myself with it, then I can *really* go off on one.
There. I can read it now, and the grey has receded enough to not take over half my (not even that big) screen.
Fix the fixed width, bring back Bill, Steve and Paris and I'll be happy...
Or were you getting fed up of groundless DCMA takedown notices for using their likenesses?
I, too, miss Odds 'n Sods though I have to confess that the paranoiac in me suspected it was being hidden to prevent me, and only me, from seeing it. Why do you punish me so? Is there someone else? There's someone else, isnt there?
On the suggestion front, your tiny-tiny fonts (eg the terms-and-conditions warning on whitepaper downloads) are unrenderable at 1280x1024 and perhaps making the sidebar banners a little more compact (eg 50%) will free up space for content without losing visible impact.
Paris, because she now looks 80% more "village of the damed".
Man, I've been so used to the old style of the Reg that I wasn't quite expecting this first thing on a Monday Morning, well done! It looks great, though it may take a while to get used to. Love the fact that the last 3 BOFH stories are all listed, this is one key reason for going onto the Reg each week, good job Simon, kept me reading for well over 5 years now!
I think a key thing is that it was well over time for the Reg to update, what took you so long? Most other sites seem to update every year and I can't remember the last time the Reg updated. Cool.
Bonez
I don't mind it *too* much except for the goddamned SMALL FIXED FONT SIZE - I use a real browser and configure my own font size, thank you - and the STUPID BLOODY FIXED WIDTH which makes it look like Drupal circa 2002 (and still, I suppose). Leave aside all the ginormo-width monitors that most of your readership will have (and those morons talking about "readibility" with the width too wide? Have you heard about resizing your browser window?), what about those of us reading on tidgy screens (yes, the eee).
Also, I miss the real Paris, evil Steve and evil Bill icons. Thank god the coat is still there.
But I do like the cleaner look - it just could have been achieved without the annoying bits.
Apart from the techno challenged IE lusers most of us are able to switch to alternative stylesheets, if they have been provided - any chance of a variable width alternative stylesheet please?
On a final note I like the way you cleverly removed the fuel from our flame throwers before we could pull the trigger. Damn your military training Lewis!
I think maybe we got a bit ahead of ourselves in pulling Odds & Sods at this point. The section is essentially what it says on the tin, i.e. a bunch of miscellaneous stuff we don't have other homes for. So it's a labelling fail really - it's BOFH, Bootnotes, Entertainment and About The Register, and most of the traffic we get to it actually seems to be on the way to BOFH. So we thought we'd make it simpler to go directly to BOFH, and reorg the rest as part of our pending sections rethink. But as we haven't done any of that bit, there's an argument for putting Odds & Sods back on the nab bar while we get on it.
Too much space taken up by the right hand bar. Squashes the text up too much.
Where's Paris gone? Did her lawyers get in touch? (fnar fnar.....)
A few nice features (most read/most commented etc)
Needs a sideways thumb or a shoulder shrug icon to display random disinterest or mediocraty.
Everything else, fine no complaint
But as widescreen monitors and larger resolutions are on the increase, let's cram it into a thin column in the middle of the screen. Yeah, newspaper luddites like that, but with liquid width have the option of making it like that simply by resizing their browser. No such option for us poor hate-scrolling-down-all-the-time suckers huh.
I guess the best I could say about this change is that at least it's not *left aligned* fixed width, which makes the inquirer barely readable
Trivial / Style issue : The new Icons are crap, especially the 'boffin'. Seriously crap. A five year old child would think them too cute - why not just have a Barbie icon, if that's your intended audience.
If I want to flame, I want a FLAME icon, not that cutesy piece of shit. And where is the "shark with frikken laser" icon we have needed for ages ?
More importantly, fixed width : WTF? Some of us have had wide screens for years now.
(As an aside, what is it with web2.0 and fixed size pages ? Why ?)
And the smaller font is annoying.
And it has minor display glitches with Opera.
And why split articles over multiple pages ?
As others have commented, you can no longer sneer at web2.0-ification, as you appear to have followed the herd away from functionality towards fashion.
FAIL - please re-submit.
Fixed width: Huge waste of space with grey bars down my screen.
New icons: Reminds me of Windows 3.0 days.
I dislike the new look so much that
a) I was compelled to make my first ever comment, and
b) I doubt I'll be reading much longer unless it improves...
Can I have my old "The Register" back please?
Paris because... well actually I don't know if Paris Sux or not...
Have you just gone crazy?
I have an normal, 17" Monitor, but still near half my screen is occupied by ugly, grey bars.
The only explanation is an April 1st joke. Yes, that's it. El Reg just played us all an April's 1st joke.
The only flaw in this logic is that we aren't in April 1st...
Ok, I got it. El Reg editors are so smart that they know tha the readers will see an April 1st joke coming in an April 1st, so they decided to play the joke of 2009/04/01 today, more tha six months before.
Very, very cunning plan Baldrick...
Am I right?
Problem: El Reg publishes so many articles that the site was beginning to look cluttered and hard to manage.
Solution: Shrink the space for normal articles so much that (on my hardly fancy 1280x1024 at least) a mere 15% of the front page is devoted to regular articles.
That's a rather bewildering step of logic there?
Overall I don't like the look of the new page but I'm not massively bothered and I'm sure I'll get used to it. It seems you've decided to sacrifice usability in exchange for more editorial power. There's no wonder the users are complaining, but I guess that was a price you decided you were happy to pay.
You clearly thought that a pre-emptive article was needed to head off at least some of the criticism. What I don't understand is why you only bothered to explain half of the changes. I'm not so bothered about fixed width, but it's clearly a massive bone of contention and a choice you've given absolutely no reasons for. I agree with everyone else that the new icons look shit - but you haven't explained those either. I really don't see how anyone thought the 'cute nursery' look was suitable for El Reg's demographic.
p.s. The most commented section is broken - this article has far more comments than any of the ones listed.
The new layout might look good (to some people) on a desktop PC with a 1280x1024 or higher resolution screen, BUT...
What about PDAs and phones (Windows Mobile, Nokia) etc? Those stupid grey bars at the sides mean the page that used to work really well now fails.
Redesign? FAIL.
Why not give registered people the option to choose which one they prefer? Or a poll ?
Fixed width on the main content is a bit daft.
The new icons suck balls, please please please revert to the old set and lose the borders.
The "Don't Miss" section at the footer looks wrong with the white icon backgrounds, cut them out and png them over the grey or lose the grey bg in the boxes, fuck it, email me the icons and I'll sort them for you.
Otherwise looks ok.
Ey up then, what's all this? Fixed width. New layouts. What was wrong with the way it was? I read your poor excuses in the article, but really, it's not April yet. I for one liked things the way they were. Now get of my lawn you pesky kids, and put back what you stole!.
Mine is the one with the little flag in the pocket that says "You Bastards!"
by making the minor changes now, it deflects attention from the major change that many people wanted to see:
ie, a change to a separation of UK relevant (including some US based) news , and US relevant (including some UK based) news, perhaps placed on different sites(OR DIFFERENT TABS if your on a 2.0 tip), say one called .co.UK and one called .COM.
I also miss the comments font...think it was ariel, it was bigger point size as well. It was a pleasure to read.....which suits me because i only read the story sub-headline and the readers comments.
grey side bars on FF??.....double you tee eff!
Greetings from Hawkes Bay, New Zealand.
Been reading here for like, forever. Almost.
Seriously. WTF?
Fixed width for the fail.
I have 3360px worth of display, and you are all like "OMFG lets placate the masses by trying to explain our way out of a poor design choice".
The rest looks awesome.
Kill fixed width. Now.
Oh, and bring back the Paris icon, unmolested. (The icon that is, I don't care what you do to Paris).
Mines the one with a URL to a fluid-width tech news site in the pocket.
FF3 on Linux, with 1440 x 900 res. Looks reasonable if I bump the font size up a couple of notches. There is a weird wraparound problem on the top right - where it says Top Stories, Most Read, Most Commented - the Commented has got wrapped around, so it is underneath and partly obscured by Top Stories. Changing font size doesn't seem to sort it out, either.
I'm not especially opposed to fixed width, but it does seem to be quite a conservative fixed width. Perhaps you could have user preferences to choose different size fixed width, or full screen?
Pretty much all good as far as look goes, but why in gods name would anybody go fixed width in a world which is increasingly going wide screen? My lappy has a 1680 wide screen and now the reg no longer uses it. Seriously, until I took a second look, I though TheReg had opened up in a thumbnail or print-ready view as I all I saw was the reg front pages occupying a smaller part of a grey screen.
Even my 1440 wide desktop screen it has become far less readable.
Is this just sacrificing usability for looks? Or to make the webdesigner's job easier?
I don't know; change like this usually makes me nervous, a bit like when you stroll into your local pub to find a glossy black tile floor, disco-ball and all the drinks now cost $15. Like 'hey, this was MY place too, and you changed it without asking me'.
It feels wrong, like I'm not welcome here anymore as I am an old Web 0.9b fossil who doesn't even have a fancy .sig file let alone a Face-Mash whatsimmyblogoid.
And what exactly was wrong with the icons, or did you cave in to a cease-and-desist from Steve Jobbies?
It might take a while for me to love you again, Reg, especiialy as this new font is a little bit unreadable on my stock IE7. It's even worse on Firefox, maybe something to do with the way some certain CAD apps screw with your fonts, though, so that might not be all your fault.
The deciding factor will be whether or not the new format is EEE-701 friendly... beware if it isn't!
1. Fixed Width? Really? No-one on your staff knows CSS well enough to make this (admittedly nice looking -- if you have your browser sized to EXACTLY the correct width) work in most any browser width? Really? It's quite easy to do. You may want to spend a few minutes at http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/
2. One of the things I liked about the Register was that it was completely unrelated to "How to Draw Cute Anime Characters in 5 Minutes". Now look at the new comment "icons". Are you really that desperate to court the 7-year-old demographic?
Argh!
As stated above: icons, fixed width, lousy font size. And no, I can't change that as I'm looking at this through "ye olde work place" setup and it won't resize and they've blocked off my options to change it. This is bad for my/others' eyesight - something that website designers really, really need to be aware of.
Take the reghardware site (someone take it, please!) It needed a reformat more than the main site and the Related stories column is unreadable due to the font being too small.
Please, get the fonts sorted out.
Well! From a design point of view, it's alright. Fixed width wise, it's awful! I run at 1920x1280 and The Reg has gone from being a nice big site to this little bar down the middle. More than half of my screen is now just grey bars.
To make it worse, the content in that bar now only goes about 2/3 of the way across it. So! Design is good, but the fixed width stuff and the tiny size of the fixed width content is a massive step back. It's like looking at a website from the late 90s.
Get it fixed so that people with half decent screens can actually use them!
Yes, it’s another commentator who thinks the person who designed the new icons should be taken out and shot. If you can’t afford a proper graphics designer, open it up to the readers? I’m not suggesting I could do any better. I couldn’t. But, I’m damn sure there must be one who can. Usual sort of prize of an El Reg T-shirt and the undying gratitude of the staff… at least until the end of the week?
(Given that the comment icons have changed, does that make the ‘IT Angle?’ and ‘I’ll Get My Coat’ T-shirts out-of-date tat or nostalgic classics?)
(more for the information of your developers than for publication)
The "TOP STORIES", "MOST READ", "MOST COMMENTED" tabs are broken on both Firefox 3.0.1 and Opera 9.52 on this Kubuntu laptop - the "COMMENTED" wraps onto a second line. On Konqueror it's worse or better depending on your point of view as both "MOST" and "COMMENTED" wrap onto line 2.
First of all:
"but as long as I can still post utter toss in the comments sections and quality of the scribblers who send the articles in is still good, then I couldn't give a rats ass if the whole site was run through Upside Downterweb, It'll still be in my bookmarks."
Can't disagree with that, except that it's probably not quite as rude as if I'd written it.
@all the knobheads complaining about fixed-widths: go and read up about what 400 character-wide columns do to readability.
@font size fetishists: twiddle your browser and plan to buy reading glasses within the next five years and wrist support a lot sooner.
@numpty complaining about adds: real vultures use content blockers and have done ever since they existed.
@the Reg: In general a great improvement but please do CSS properly and add a print css and presumably one for mobiles. Site does render fine for me on Presto 9.6 and on my G900 but the background grey is too dark and the icons are mainly cock except for the coat one. Looks like an updated form of 1970's naive style and let's face it the 70's was the decade that style forgot. As for you symbols: either photorealism or iconographic but never, ever both. Smells like an opportunity for a competition. The Economist recently reinvented itself to good effect (except for mobiles).
Mine's the one with the nearly completed manuscript "How I made the internet" and would you order me a taxi and a couple of coke whores? Ta,
Fixed width
Comment icons
Both are shit, really shit. Please fix.
Other than that - as long as the article quality to which I have become accustomed remains, I couldn't give two hoots what else you. I do appreciate the effort though and am actually quite glad to see the back of the headline hopscotch that had been going on on the front page over the last few months.
But seriously - yet another vote for: you reallyreallyREALLY need to ditch fixed width and bring back the old comment icons. The new ones just look cheap. Way too many wishy washy pastel shades! No offence to whoever created them, but don't give up the day job.
Like the BBC news site, or most other news sites?
Users always hate change, but sometimes it's just something you have to do. I can't decide if I like the design yet. It seems a little more readable on an iPhone screen (flame away, I don't care), but there is heck of a lot of wasted space on the right column in any browser. But then, same goes for most news sites. You can never please everyone: personally I don't use browsers full screen (trust me, even the wonderful Reg full-screen on a 30" Apple Cinema Display would be totally overwhelming), so I'm quite happy for fixed width sites. Fixed with allows for a wider range of design choices that doesn't destroy the layout soon as a user resized the browser.
My first thoughts:
I can see the reason for the overhaul, but the fixed width is just stupid. At home I use a widescreen and I have two large grey bars. Add to this the fact that the text takes up only about 60% of the actual white screen and it's bloody annoying already. I don't want to be staring at large white and grey bars. Or are you going to have adverts all the way down the page, no matter how long the page is??? So we the loyal readers get screwed either way: 1. We have to do extra scrolling for no good reason, or 2. number 1 plus we get more bloody adverts.
The front page: The section and date/time stamp above the story detracts from the text you want to be reading, making it harder to read than before. (I mean your eyes do not fall on the correct text as easily as before).
Icons - get real. Why do you think we want babyish icons? Computers have more power to make things look more realistic than ever and you think it's best to make your icons less realistic? What is the thinking there?
If I feel different in a weeks time, I'll let you know. If I've not got absolutely sick of the scrolling before that! Idiots.
1) Used to work fine on my mobile phone (IE on Windows Mobile); now looks rubbish - after every group of 3 stories there's a huge amount of white space, to start with, and the horizontal alignment on the main page jumps about (some things appear left-aligned, some things right-aligned).
2) Comments box: using Firefox 3.0.2 under Ubuntu I have to click on the left half of the "title" box - at the left half I get the normal text caret cursor, but when the cursor is over the right half it doesn't think it's a text box!
3) Fixed width = epic fail. It's bad enough on my laptop at the moment, but I shudder to think how it'll look on my widescreen monitor tomorrow. The whole point of good web design is that your website should look good regardless of resolution/screen size, font size etc etc.
4) The new comment icons are horrible. Where are Paris and Steve?
I actually quite like the new appearance. I just wish you'd tested it a bit more before pushing it out.
John,
I accept your explanation, and duly de-escalate my paranoid delusions to regular midweek levels. I personally tend to use the O&S front page as a source of those quirky anecdotes that help me understand the British, and their furry cousins, the French - though I do reject the unflattering portrayal of Australians (clearly the result of prejudice, malice, and malcontent). You could arguably treat the whole shebang as one section and axe the other sub classifications all together (BOFH excepted, of course). Give it a Reg 2.0 name though..
How about "Club Reg"? "RegTopia"?
Tim Berners-Lee was on BBC Radio 4 'Today' programme just now decrying the spread of anti-scientific rumour and 'bad science' on the internet. He added "Some sites are also turning to bad icons... a prime example is The Register website."
Actually, I made that last bit up.
@ John Lettice: Quote "...there's an argument for putting Odds & Sods back on the nav bar..." Nice to see you conceding valid points, El Reg. So if we can have Odds & Sods reinstated, can we have 'iquid width' and our old icons back please.
PS Enjoy your holiday, Sarah, and come back soon.
The "share this article" link appears AFTER the rest of the page renders. This means the "post a comment" link is suddenly displaced to the right. If you put the "share this article link" to the right of the "post a comment link" or found a way to pin the "post a comment" link to its correct position before the javascript executes to render "share this article", it would look less fussy and one's eye would not be drawn to the unnecessary movement...
Is there any reason why the "share this article" LINK has to appear using javascript? If so, why not use jquery or something so that it can be placed there as soon as the DOM has settled down, rather than the whole page has loaded?
Also - I think you could cheerfully increase the line width. It looks like a "spacious layout" executed in a "cramped way".
This post has been deleted by its author
There's absolutely nothing wrong with my eyes but unless I zoom to 120% reading The Reg hurts so much!!
My resolution is 1280x800 and I can only imagine that the font will be even smaller on my other computer!
By the way, to those who said the site doesn't work right on Opera 9.52, try updating to 9.60
Windows
http://snapshot.opera.com/windows/o960s_10427m.exe
Mac
http://snapshot.opera.com/mac/o960s_5223.dmg
Unix
http://snapshot.opera.com/unix/snapshot-2426/
The site is great.
Okay, so the layout is broken, the graphics are not available yet, and you are still waiting for the final style sheets, but I look forward to seeing it when it is finished.
I liked the fact that you had icons quickly redrawn from memory by an eight-year-old after the old site broke down. It is a good way to save money and it prevents us from feeling guilty that Adblock still works perfectly.
So much for articles about whale-song and joss-sticks, eh? Woooooeeeeooo...
No, don't like it at all ... seems to have gone the same ways as the awful BBC news revamp from earlier this year. Anyway, at least the BBC episode caused me to find the stylist add-on for firefox so I could tweak that into a slighlty more acceptable (to me!) form and maybe I'll have to do the same for the reg ... alternatively, as they say on the BBC "there are other suppliers of tech news"
I agree, fixed width of 800 is *very* annoying, I use 1280x800 on my lappie - such a waste with the horrid grey bars - much harder to scroll, so much to read - "Give me freedom to reformat width! or give me death!!!!" (hmmm, should'nt have offered an alternative I guess) -getting me coat....
I suppose el Reg was the last bastion of pre-gradient-fill design and it was only to be expected that you would go for that sooner or later, but I think the gradient could be a little smoother and if you're really going for it, one would expect that at the very least a lickable vulture would be in order.
The icons don't make sense and suck more than the old ones- I mean what is the one I'm using here even supposed to represent? A sad green upwards raindrop? The huge expanses of grey either side of the story are quite annoying but it may just be that they are too high contrast. Given that you're working with a more tech savvy readership you could potentially design for a slightly higher-resolution screen by default. If you're using good CSS people can work around it anyways if it's bothering them so I'd think to design for the majority. Certainly for me the text is tiny and the site as a whole is a small vertical strip in a sea of dark grey.
Otherwise it's fine. This form I'm using now is much better.
I was going to complain about the fixed width thing, but then someone said ctrl+ and I gave it a try and now everything is bigger and better.
I had a great joke too, about how you were turning your site into a fashion model (pretty but too thin), and how this would make all us web devs bulimic.
Comedy gold I tell you.
Oh. It only stays zoomed until I go to a new page. Well, that's disappointing.
... when you could have used max-width to preserve readability on large displays, while letting the site re-flow on small displays (eg my Eee701's 800 width which I'm guessing will require scrolling as the fixed width is obviously optimised for the 1024 width display I'm using at present)? You can always send fixed width CSS to broken browsers like IE6 and earlier. Really missed opportunity to improve things for everyone.
For the grey-background haters, excessive line lengths slow reading down. If you have your window maximised on a large display so you see tons of the grey background you probably have missed the point of having a large display, ie having lots of windows visible at once, not having to maximise everything to see what you're doing etc.
Oh, and the new icons are disastrous, much preferred the old ones.
I'll chime in with the thunderous disapproval of the new icons.
And I'll disagree with the two posters who praised the new favicon. It's actually worse than any of the new comment icons. No matter how hard I stare at it telling myself "that's a Reg Vulture", it's still a headless man running with a briefcase.
The fixed width isn't too obnoxious with my current browser window size, though I'm sure I'll grow to vigorously hate it after a while.
Everything else I've seen of the new new seems OK.
Core dump icon just 'cuz nobody else has used it yet in this thread. Plus I'm chasing a mysterious core dump right now.
I'll get used to the rest of the changes but the fixed width thing is bugging me, funnily enough for the opposite reason as everyone else.
I like to keep el reg in a relatively small window at work so I can watch a movie on ninjavideo while browsing articles. I need to keep this maximised now to be able to read it. You're decreasing my productivity and ability to multitask damnit!
To simplify it in Sergio Leone style:
Good: new layout.
It will take me a few days to get used to it, but it feels more organized now. Bravo.
Bad: smaller fonts and soul-sucking gray borders.
If you really have to have a border, please make it somewhat smaller, and black. This gray reminds me of sci-fi stories in which hyperspace has absence of colour that makes humans insane. Dilbert's PHB (or Catbert) would have been proud of it.
Ugly, and I mean uglier than looking at Eli Wallach's face for the rest of the life: new icons.
Dear <supreme deity of your choice> in heaven, they are too childish. This is El Reg, not Disney Channel. Please, please, *please* give us back our old icons. I know El Reg can be reasoned with... Hell, even Orlowski sometimes lets us comment on his articles. :-)
We can always buy Webster Phreaky a ticket and send him to strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger... errr, have a reasonable conversation with you. We know you'd prefer Dominatrix, of course. ;-)
Why don't you put up a questionnaire with "fixed width, yes or no", "icons, old, new or suggest new ones" and other questions? It might give you concise answers on what we feel, without having to wade through dozens of posts criticising or praising your decisions.
Black helicopter, as it's the only old icon left. :-(
The new site is fine, but whilst the font used on articles is just about bearably small, that used in the comments section is unbearably small. I know I should probably get glasses, but one of the joys of the Old Reg was it's readability. Why are they different anyway?, surely what we have to say is just as important :-)
Oh... and your icons seem to have gone pastel/beige but I can live with that.
PS. The font size on the "Preview post" page is fine :-)
Why not:
a) find the width of the user's window.
Note -- window means window, not screen. The width of the screen is irrelevant, its the width of the window that matters.
b) set the page width as "100%". Rocket science, that bit. B
c) determine the OPTIMUM number of columns for the width as determined in a). Thinking mainly of the home page here, obviously the story page has to be a single column. Nobody would be stupid enough to run a story in two columns, would they? Apart from Adobe Acrobat, that is.
d) ensure all paragraph text is fully re-wrappable, so that it properly fits the chosen number of columns. OK, there *should* probably be a MAX width -- though only if you can somehow make it a percentage of the point size *after* the user has enlarged or reduced font sizes according to their own needs.
This gives ALL the benefits of fixed width WITHOUT the drawbacks -- I think.
... why couldn't it be the grey banners instead? OK, they do make the content panel look a little prettier, but on the larger resolutions they do look bad. And, I for one, generally prefer reading longer lines.
And the comments are fixed and an even smaller width, which looks rather odd to me.
Site has horizontal scrollbar when in small form too, or at least does for comments. The webdev toolbar tells me my viewport is 847x465 (Contrary to popular belief, sometimes some of us do browse the web in a shrunken window.... ).
... if you disable all style sheets.
Seriously, this is a step backwards in terms of design and indeed in terms of the way web design is heading. This is very much a late 90's rendering completely missing the point of capturing the eye, specifically of people on the move.
Too much is happening on the front page, way too much.
EVERY time I've visited The Reg in the last couple of years I've got a little rush of excitement BECAUSE of the design of your front page - it was just so very very comforting, appealing and easy-to-read. That sensation has gone. Like Superman ripping open his shirt and revealing an egg-stained string vest.
Could you still serve up the old design if users clicked on a 'give me the old version' button? I imagine El Reg must be masters of separating data and design by now so perhaps this could be an option? We are special.
Cheers.
I had a bad weekend - finally got things sorted out at 22:00 Sun night. Came into work and the AS400 is playing up; loads of calls from (L)users. Just trying to relax now and 2 of the sites that I log in to to help preserve my sanity have decided over the weekend to make major changes - I don't like!!
Having said that, I suppose I will get used to it - the icons are a bit naff tho'.
I read for the news, not the appearance. Make sure that you keep up the good work and I'll forgive.
I'm one of those who thought it was weird how stories moved their way around on the page and never got it. I like this new look, and it does indeed appear to solve the problems you attempted to address.
I hope it works out for you, though I still won't accept the ads; I use AdBlock. I'd be willing to pay a subscription to El Reg, like with any other rag of interest, but I just don't like ads.
Cheers!
-dZ.
and I'm kinda late to the party obviously, but what is the gripe with fixed width layouts? Is scrolling really such a chore?
I'm viewing this on a 1680 x 1050 monitor, so if you have a site which is 100% width, I find it impossible to read if I set the browser window to full screen. In fact I'd resize the window to approximately A4 paper style aspect to read it.
I think the new layout looks nice, and you included a reg tombstone icon for the comments for all the people who are unimpressed to use.
This new icon because I think it looks happy.
Good job, like the design.
In regards to mobile devices, absolutely Fubar on my Windows Touch Plus, okay if I go through Google's mobile portal, but I don't really want to do that.
Can people also stop comparing to Facefcuk as well, there are many other sites out there that used a similiar layout before that atrocity of a site.
Icons - like'em generally but do miss some of the old ones, I also miss the thundercats and ulysses but they ain't coming back either so who cares.
Liking most of it, until I maximised the window, 1440 x 900 res just makes the site look silly, and what with widescreens becoming all the rage, this could do with rectifying.
Also, and I say this in nicest possilbe way....
WTF HAVE YOU DONE WITH THE PHOTO ICONS?!
Seriously, the icons were fine as they were, what was missing was more icons. The new ones look retro, but not in a good way. Any new readers will just be confuddled by the Paris Hilton references.
<quote>Fixed Width? Really? No-one on your staff knows CSS well enough to make this (admittedly nice looking -- if you have your browser sized to EXACTLY the correct width) work in most any browser width? Really? It's quite easy to do. You may want to spend a few minutes at http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/</quote>
Have you figured out how to do columnar text flow in CSS 2, then?
That is like, the Philosophers' Stone in CSS design. Please share your technique. Especially with EVERY SINGLE MAJOR NEWS PUBLICATION ON THE WEB.
You are my God. I KEESS YOU.
Reg: Go ahead and lose the fixed width, but be prepared for the avalanche of complaints about marathon lines of text across 2000+ pixel width displays.
Threw me at first when I did my first-cup-of-coffee-look and I did hit Ctrl+F5 a few times to make sure Monday wasn't playing tricks on my eyes.... but nope.... el Reg has changed.
and I like it.
I'm stunned as I loved the old layout but this layout works well and I am probably one of the few who actually do like the new comment icons as well.
Good work folks
I still find that it makes the current incarnation of the BBC website a terrible fucking thing to read (well, that and their obsession with forcing useless flash players and fucking stupid page design), and I can't see it being any better here.
I don't overly object to you attempting to achieve high readability standards - though anyone who says "but X characters is optimal for everyone!" probably needs a fucking slap - but you just effectively removed my option of browing in an actual window rather than full screen. I quite like having enough screen real estate to have multiple windows on screen and visible at the same time, and not everybody has the wonder of a large widescreen which would now make that possible.
Also, new icons = shit.
I have to say I have a lot of respect for the staff at 'El Reg' for actually checking these boards and caring about user feedback. Many companies I have seen in the past quickly take on a stone faced approach of "this is the new way we want it, and users will just have to get used to it!".
So huge kudos for you all for caring about your users.
I'm not overly chuffed with the move to fixed width - just compared the Google cache of the "old" Reg with the new one, and there's definitely lost space there. But if you simply must have fixed width, then at least change the colour of the grey bars at the sides - they are just way too dark and it really makes you feel hemmed in. The BBC News site goes for a very light grey and it makes the boundary between content and background fade away a lot. Simply lightening the grey would be a big step.
Oh yes, and some of the new icons are far too cutesy for their own good - I mean, even the skull and crossbones is grinning, for god's sake! Why is Paris made to look like a vaguelly intelligent, non-skanky blonde? And the flame icon is so "meh" it's totally at odds with the "steam coming out my ears" description. More like "I'm slightly surprised and am glowing luke-warmly"...
And definitely need a competition for a new masthead. Though I can understand you being hesitant of giving your readers a say in such a prominent branding element. And bring back the titles of the first few comments on the article page - they were good at drawing me in, as I'd see at a glance if there were some interesting comments.
Meh, I started this comment intending not to be all negative (really, I did!) as there are good things about the new design. But got bogged down in some details of the things I don't like. I can see why you wanted more control over the layout, especially to give more prominence to certain stories.
In a nutshell: lighten the grey bars a lot and make the icons less cutesy.
What I've been doing so far is presenting an explanation or fix where it's relatively straightforward. We'll do a roundup of where we think we are, and of the responses, probably tomorrow, and we'll cover fixed width there.
Executive summary now though. We understood on the way in that there would be readers who would object strongly and loudly to the switch, but we felt that the gains we would make in ability to control the look and feel of our product would outweigh this. We still think that, but having now establshed the format (subject to some tweaking), we ought then to be able to look at how we can cater for larger screens and handhelds.
General new look: 8 out of 10 - not bad! Smoother, and more, um, perfeshnul!
Top banner: 9 out of 10 - like it!
favicon.ico: 10 out of 10 - EEEEEVIL ;-)
Fixed width: 1 out of 10 - come on, give us wide-screen peeps a chance! Try the CCS 2 multi-column stuff and if it breaks in IE then who gives a F&%$ - real IT people don't use IE! (puts flame-proof coat on...)
Icons: 0 out of 10 - BRING BACK THE *REAL* PARIS ICON!!!! Actually, bring back ALL the old "photo" icons. I haven't added an icon cos I don't like 'em!
I just tried it on my PDA (set to view as fit to screen), and I get a couple of headlines then 3-5 blank screens worth, then another few headlines, then more blank screens and so on. Dreadful. It used to be bad to use before (lots of scrolling to get to the content) but at least once you got to the content, it was okay. Now you need to get through so many blank pages in the middle of a few headlines, before more blank pages....
"So i always read El Reg on my phone, the new design crashes my N95 out everytime i point to the site.
Its only on a news page, not the front page. So i get teased and then booted out.
Nice one!"
My 6650d [the new flip one with 3G, not the old one] works OK on both the boggo Symbian browser that comes with it, and with Opera Mini - column resizing etc all seems OK on both browsers.
So, as far as I'm aware, both phones use the same browser/underlying kit [I'm happy to be corrected on this] to render web pages, I suggest your phone may tweeking.
Steven R
... The new page is much smaller. The old main page used to weigh in at 100+k, now we're down to 37k. Much better.
1) Yes - crap on mobile. Muchy scrolly, plus some stories get offset from the left margin (making a narrow page even narrower).
2) Fixed width is poor - if I don't like wide lines, I'll shrink my browser width. Even if you must set a maximum width for readability, the minimum width should be around the 200 pixel mark.
3) I notice the css is called "style_picker/design". Does that mean we'll get to choose from several styles at some point?
For a laff I tried blocking the css in AdBlock. Hey, now I get a fast-loading, any-width-I-like, but ugly page!
It does load faster and I'm quite happy with how the stories are arranged even if there do seem to be many fewer on the page. Given that there are consistenly only a couple of complaints you can probably consider the rest of the design to perhaps be a success.
Changing the icons just after putting half of them on T-Shirts seems a bit funny.
I'll get my... erm... Jedi Robe from the looks of it...
Your new layout sucks balls on my XDA Orbit. It looked fine before, but now I have the longest page in existence. Scrolling down for about 30 seconds makes the scroll bar move about 0.005 millimeters.
I tend to browse thereg and one other site on my pda about once an hour or so throughout the day to get my internet news fix, and you just made it really annoying for me!
Sort it out chaps.
The icons might take a while, I for one liked the dead bird icon. Still the penguin is here.... now where is the one that celebrates the death of Microsoft?
And we need one of ballmer (really hasn't a clue of the planet he is one or the company he leads or the people he is trying to sell to) in a straight jacket.
...I like it.
Nice to see the old Icons back though.
Some of the new ones were poo and kind of screwed up your merchandising I thought.
Why sell a T-shirt with the green /Coat icon when you'd replaced it.
Seemed a bit silly.
Good to see you've sorted yourselves out.
A-, could do better, see me after class etc.
We've got somewhere over 50 links to editorial in the new design, and approximately the same number in the old. We think maybe the new front page is a little too lengthy as it is right now, so we might decide to run with a few less, but the numbers still won't be all that different.
New design basically ok but fixed width means I have to do more scrolling, paging and cursing. There is such an amount of wasted screen space in those big grey bars when you use a large desktop. Is the font smaller too? maybe I imagined that.
Please drop the fixed width - the idea of formatting the text in a browser to fit the size of the windows available is one of the fundamentals of browser design. To limit it to 800 pixels wide no matter how big the desktop is just plain barking.
In short - PLEASE drop the fixed width, I might as well have an 800*600 screen.
1st - Glance, EEK! And how many adverts?! and how small is the text ?!
2nd - Thought, where do I winge!
3rd - Oooh look, a link to a stroy about what they've done!
4th - Read said story, I'm happier now :)
5th - Post my own comment to say thank you for taking the time to say WHY you've changed things, so many sites just say woohoo look at our wonderfully new improved look, innit snazzy! Nice to know there was a reason to a number of changes that are potentially annoying :)
People never like change, me included to a point, but there is reason for this change and without the adds it's likely you wouldn't be here too. So I'm still undecided on the look, mostly because of the smaller font used on the homepage for all the stories, and I miss reading the title of the 1st few comments on each story so will read the comments less now, and likley post less comments.
My 2 cents / pence / euro's!
On my little portable, the new fixed width works very well. But can someone explain to me why a 1920x1440 screen means a 1920x1440 browser window? I have always found maximized windows to be unwieldly and inconvenient, especially when you have multiple windows open on the same screen, even going way back to another platform. (I promised someone I would not mention Amiga so much, so I will not mention Amiga here.)
My laptop has a screen resolution of 1024x768, so I now often find myself with maximized windows. But on my 1600x1200 monitor, windows stay sized around 1024x768, which allows me to see activity in other windows and easily move from window-to-window without making the trek to the task bar or ALT-TAB. FireSizer is very handy for this. Huge windows do not allow for taking in a chunk of information in a single glance. Even when scrolling the window I do not have to move my eyes or head about to find information; all of the information is contained within a single area which fits my field of vision and allows me to absorb it all at once and then focus on the specific items which catch my interest.
Paris, specific item which catches interest -- does require a huge window to free up hands from scrolling duties.
if the site is too wide fullscreen on a widescreen, that is the fault of the idiot reading it fullscreen-ona-widescreen. Put it ina window if it worries you, but don't fuckup MY ability to read the site. fixed-width SUCKS, as do the new icons, as does the kerning in the new banner. The old site was MUCH more useable on both my 1280-wide laptop (opera9.52) and in opera mini on my phone. Also, this page currently fails w3c validator, and the site works better as of now with NO css applied.
Please do something about it
crappy new paris icon, cos you now need glasses to read the site
My 2p worth:
- not enough white space. Everything is far too cluttered making the site hard to read. Recommendation: Increase the white-space margins around text blocks
- text font size too small. Found myself skipping bits of articles because I the text size is hard to read, I know I can change the zoom settings but why should I? Have a look at a side-by-side comparison of old v new, the ChannelRegister ones make good comparisons. Recommendation: increase the default text size by 1pt, preferably 2.
- adverts are intrusive and not techy-friendly. As mentioned above, more than a few techy people will read this with FF3 and no-script meaning the only ads you get credited for are the GoogleAds ones. I tried it with IE and the ads are so bloody annoying that it's distracting. On FF3 with no-script, the advert/right column stopped with 6 rows of stories to go, on IE, the advert/right column went below the stories. As also mentioned, I won't punch holes in my security setup to read one website, no matter how good although I don't use Adblock as I know sites have to make money. Recommendation: either use more GoogleAds or similar non-Flash/java adverts OR accept that you're going to lose revenue.
- "don't miss" banner should be at the top otherwise it will be missed by many :)
- icons. Pish. Really... just pish. And that's not Paris regardless of what the hover-over text says. Recommendation, either bring back the old ones or pay for some replacements that fit the new site requirements.
- fixed width. Done to death above. At least change the colour to a less claustrophobic side panel.
Overall: not a great fan of the changes, it just gives the site the image of any other Web2.0 bore-fest regardless of content. You need bigger, better, more readable and suitable for techies who whine a lot :D
Well done - not often do I like redesigns but you have managed to keep some reg-ishness about the design.
Providing the icons revert I'm all up for the change.
One gripe though - you could have added a "new comments" email notification for comments section - it's been the biggest missing feature I could see on reg since the introduction of the paris icon (obviously that was no-1 missing feature until it happened!).
Paris - because luckily I've been too busy to notice the dark time between when you removed her pretty face and put her back on again...
hahaha, what are the page links doing all the way over and down there?? I've just read 4 articles and thought they ended rather abruptly without making a point. mate has just done the same. the page links need to go somewhere near the comments and post comments bar. not in the second column at the bottom of the screen.
actually, the fixed width complainers (including me) actually heard that argument earlier. Fixed width sucks because YOU DON"T GET TO CHOOSE HOW WIDE YOU WANT THE WINDOW. It imposes a maximum width upon the (useable/readable) window. What is just right for you means scrolling sideways on a mobile/scc, and means HUGE, UGLY GREY BARS on anything widescreen. With the old layout, on a widescreen the frontpage articles shifted up so they were wider and more on-screen at once so you could scan for blue links to unread articles, then have a look at the title, fixed width ruins this, you now have to scroll FOREVER in order to find anything, and it's a waste of space. Widescreen monitors aren't just wide, they are also shorter (mine is 800px tall) so this fixed with crap means reading the frontpage now takes forever, i can't just open, glance, no new articles, close, i have to sit there and SCROLL DOWN FOREVER in order to check, and hence won't. Pissing off the readers is stupid, consider me (and anyone else with a widescreen or a small screen or a large screen) royally pissed off.
yours reading an ugly site with css disabled
Lee
There have been some people complaining about 'more' ads, so I think I'll try to clear that up.
We have ad inventory requirements, as do all ad funded publications. Because we have a fairly large readership, our ad inventory substantially exceeds those requirements. We'd only need loads more ad space if we slashed our rates and went gunning for vastly more low rate ads. And how dumb would that be?
Our rates are the same as they were last week, our requirements are the same, and we can fulfil them just as well now as then.
You're getting the ads in different parts of the page, certainly, but there aren't more of them. As a matter of fact some of you are seeing pages where one or more of the ad slots aren't filled, in which case the editorial links are simply sitting next to one another. People may be perceiving more 'ads' because we haven't quite got the format of the editorial images in the right hand column right, and you may be clocking them as ads.
We'll be working on that. But really, there are no more ads than there were before.
I've yet to see the new layout on a computer screen as i'm away from my desks. But, as I regularly use my windows mobile phone to read el reg, I can see the new pages in handheld form..... or should I say I can't see it!
The new layout is very bad for my mobile with formating totally screwed, text all over the place, text sized badly, HUGE white spaces and gaps and links that seem unconnected to text. All in all, take a look at the formating or give us a mobile version with all stories in chronological order plus subject area diversification if the reader wants it.... Please.
The implementation of the new header/footer (the slightly 3d bright red behind the Register logo) is a little weak. It's not the idea - that is fine, but it has been done in a way that looks a little "unpolished" and also slightly cramped. The large panels of grey on either side are perhaps a little too dark - it looks like you have looked at the BBC front page, seen how well it works, then tried to implement something "similar but different..." (Nothing wrong with that - as long as the "differences" add to the site. They don't.)
I don't like the black vertical line between the white of the page and the dark grey side panels. It makes the page look rather "flat". Also the dark grey within light grey of the "Don't miss" section at the bottom of each page is a bit fussy - particularly with white backgrounded puff-images.
I suggest: stop being afraid of being accused of excessive "inspiration" by the BBC and do what works rather than trying to be visually different for the sake of it.
I can understand the reasons for the structural changes and for the new layout. But visually the site currently lacks "p-zaz" and polish. It looks slightly "unbalanced" and "uneasy". It currently looks like "just another website" and lacks the distinction of the previous version.
I think this can be fixed easily enough with minor tweaks of the template.
that grey background please. The crisper look isn't unpleasing but the background isn't part of the page so it shouldn't be part of the page design - it should be as neutral as possible, if not invisible. Those grey bars look like the steel doors at the end of Get Smart sliding shut - I'm getting claustrophobic. and I fear for my nose.
Apart from that - what everyone else is saying. The font's too small for my tired eyes. I'm using opera so the only option I have here is to scale the page which is hardly optimal. And the icons. - I was never a fan of the old ones but this aint an improvement.
Fire up the old firefox browser, and lo and behold - welcome to your exciting new home page, brought to you by those awfully nice people at El Reg. Lilliputian text sizes and fixed width fonts and total lack of consistency between text size used in articles and comment sections to ensure you get your daily workout, banging away on that old 'ctrl+' key combo. Nice job, guys.
But hey, Firefox is an extensible browser so just install the NoSquint extension and fiddle around with the 'per site' settings until you find an optimum combination - or in the case of El Reg don't find one. Nice job, guys.
You also missed a trick with the redesigned icons - could have made them animated so that the site was fully Yahoo compliant!
On a more constructive note, surely this was an ideal opportunity to insist that posters use a unique user name so that they can be referenced in the comment section, or at the very least append a reference number to each Anonymous Coward.
Keep taking the tablets.
Excellent idea. That will make it even easier for people to post comments without reading the article first.
PS Re: Dave Harris: I've posted here with that name before, but not often, and I guess this is the first article which we've both been commenting to. I've now renamed myself from "Dave Harris" to "Brangdon", because I'd hate for anyone to tar us both with the same brush. (It doesn't look like old comments reflect the new name.)
You complain that you have to put all the stuff on a "very narrow window". It's your fault! Why do you limit the width? I mean current laptops screens are much more wide than high. In a wide browser window, the headlines titles can show in two lines instead of three, or one instead of two, allowing more titles to be seen at a glance, without being forced to scroll down. By limitting _yourself_ to a fixed width, you limit our ability to see more stuff in the browser window.
That said, the new look is really nice.
Yuck. On my widescreen monitors I've got tons of wasted space to the grey bars. I could deal with the ads being bigger if you hadn't forced me to the fixed width. I'll give it a chance, but first brush with it has left me disturbed and annoyed. I may have to shop around for a new tech news site if it bugs me too much.
I like some of the changes, dislike others. Here's my logic for both, and what I would be interested in seeing.
Fixed Width: A bit frustrating, to be honest. I'm running at 1600 width, and I get about the center 50% of my screen with valid, usable text. Otherwise, it's devoted to two gray bars on either side of this used space. I'm fine with a cleaner look; in fact, this is growing on me a bit. However, might it be a better idea to stay with variable width, but just use percentage based widths? IE, 10-15% on either side is devoted to gray, with the rest being usable space? Still gives you a cleaner look, but allows more flexibility.
Front page: I like the headliner story method. The top one works great, very eye catching, gives a bit more detail. The two below a little bit seem out of place, but can work. They break up the flow, which could be a bad thing- might be a bit more useful to stick it straight under the first banner one, but that's definitely a stylistic choice. The banner space used on the right for ads and editorials is fairly nicely laid out, useful without being busy. The only real solid change I'd be interested in is (and I understand the complexity involved in this request) more stories to a line. having four stories to a line across instead of three would greatly help with how far the page needs to be scrolled to get to everything. However, the drawback is that those on smaller screens might not appreciate having to scroll left and right to see all the stories and the editorial lines. Would probably have to be dynamic, which could be a pain in the ass to recode.
Article page: Overall, no complaints. Still not the happiest about fixed width, but that's probably largely because my machine is running a very high resolution. The changes to the comments section are a bit of a mixed bag to me, partly missing the first little tag line of the comments, part of me being fairly amused at the new icons. I do like being able to see all the comments while writing mine; makes it easier to write replies.
"we felt that the gains we would make in ability to control the look and feel of our product would outweigh this."
Ah, but that's misguided website design. Did you hire a bunch of designers with magazine/print backgrounds, where they had control over the placement of every pixel?
I shun the look and feel of your product anyway, and read using Opera in "user mode," where CSS is ignored entirely. I forget why I started doing that years ago, but it was probably because you made lousy typeface choices, or something like that. That flexibility is another of Opera's key features: You land on some abhorrent site whose "designer" decided purple text on a black background was K00l? Just type Shift-g (i.e., capital 'G') and CSS is instantly disabled, rendering the site with your default typeface in black on a white background.
They already HAVE a "post comments" at the top of the article, so you can post a comment not only without reading the article, but without actually reading any other comments instead. I just wanted a "view comments" so I could see the comments without having to post one.
And I've decided that fixed-width is utterly pants. Stupid idea.
Thanks for bringing some of the icons back. Now to get rid of that "cute" flame icon. If I want cute, I'll beat it out of a pokemon with a crowbar or something.
It *would* be OK, apart from the fixed width. With that, you've ruined a potentially decent update. To compound the problem, look at the amount of the limited width that's taken up with the stuff on the right! Special reports and jobs! If I want those, I'll go looking for them. I don't want them shoved down my throat on every page.
and yeah.. i've got a widescreen monitor... 2 actually.. one at 15" and one at 24", but i never browse in a full sized window, as i have multiple windows open all the time, all in slighly different positions, and it works well.. i probably have an inch of grey etiher side, which makes it look kinda nice...
my only gripe (apart from the icons, but some of them have returned!) is that the menu going across the top, doesn't fit right on an iPhone screen, however, the rest of the site looks ok, and is browsable, odds and sods is on a second line, and science is partially hidden by the search box...
well.. looks like i'm the only one complimenting, so i'll post anonymously in fear of flaming...
paris... just cos she's back!
... what would also be nice is an "Account Management" link. For a while now it's been easy to find the "create new account" link, but it's been really tricky to find anywhere to, for example, change your nick (or even your password).
(And while I'm at it, add another vote against the current icons (although they are growing on me), and a huge vote against fixed width and for a style sheet for mobiles)
but non-fixed-width fits more to a page automagically, as each article link+blurb becomes wider with less lines, so you have as many on screen at once as will fit. Four-to-a-line would actually _reduce_ the number of articles per visible page, because of the spaces between them. Works the other way too, with a really narrow screen/window, the individual links just become narrower and taller, with the same page layout of three-to-a-line. you should *Never* have to horizontal scroll, with the single exception being directly viewing high-res images *one-at-a-time* _After_ clicking a thumbnail.
My initial reaction on viewing this new design for the first time today was that I felt like my eyes were being assaulted, there was just to much stuff trying to grab my attention crammed into too small a space. I think this has already been said, but the effect reminds me of a tabloid newspaper (which this isn't) not a tech news website (which it is).
It doesn't help that this new design no longer fills my 1600x1200 screen, i'm having to do a lot more scrolling to read articles now, which isn't good for my RSI. Furthermore a fixed width design like this is likely to cause horizontal scrolling problems on small screens. I feel a 'fix The Register' firefox extension coming on if one dosn't exist already.
The boxes down the right hand side of the page, which on the old design had a nice balance to them now feel overpowering and distract the eye from the main content of the articles, which makes it more difficult to concentrate on reading the stuff I came to your website for. The grey box in the middle of the articles listing increases this sense of 'assault' on the eyes when viewing the main page. Dividing a block of text with something that isn't relevant to that text is a design disaster.
The end result of this new design is that my initial view of the front page now contains 70% less 'stuff that interests me', which isn't good for you guys if other people feel the same, website traffic and hence advertising revenue is going to go down. I read the Reg because it isn't like a traditional newspaper, if that's the road you want to go down, then you're likely to loose me as a reader.
A final thought : Was there any user feedback involved in this ? You seem to have decided with this new design to try and fix problems which to my mind don't exist. Please guys and gals, don't mess with success.
John Lettice said: "We've got somewhere over 50 links to editorial in the new design, and approximately the same number in the old. We think maybe the new front page is a little too lengthy as it is right now, so we might decide to run with a few less, but the numbers still won't be all that different."
Wait a fucking minute. So you said in this article that one of the main reasons for the redesign was that the main page was too busy, and now the new main page is too busy, so you might cut it down? How the fuck does that logic work?
I know it's your site and all, but this is the same mistake I made last time I deployed a Joomla CMS. It wouldn't look so bad if it weren't for the fixed width.
Penguin, because Windows won't run on my laptop because the stupid tw*t who gave it to me didn't have the proprietary connector for the hard-disk (#$%^ Dell proprietary #$%^&)....
There was a clear layout on the old design, and for me personally the same does not apply to the new design. I count at least 6 different sections on the homepage, and no clear layout to it at first glance.
It looks like a mess.
That section row you have with the two items that falls within the list of articles needlessly breaks up the main list of article links. If you really must have this then perhaps you could place it directly underneath the single item row? Wouldn't stories shown on this row belong in the 'top stories' tab anyway? What's the difference between the 'top stories' tab, the two article row near the top of the page and the 'don't miss' section towards the bottom of the page? Why split up similar content into different sections like this?
We might also not be seing more ads, but are the ads the same size? They seem bigger to me. The ads also mean that you end up with a huge chunk of unused space on the longer articles, since you end up with unused space in that second column.
Finally I think that this has already been mentioned many times before, but is it really such a good idea to nail down your layout to the extent that the user can't control font size?
The logic works better if you read what I said, rather than what you said.
I said it was too crammed, and that one of our goals was to have a greater ability to promote stories that we felt deserved more exposure. At the same time, I said, we wanted to give those who wanted to view stories in the order of publication that opportunity, not messed up the way it previously was.
And second time around I didn't say it was too busy, I said we felt we might have too many stories on the front page. That is, it's maybe too long. And we have Earlier stories to let people read back through the stories that have dropped off the bottom.
Not sure why my comments from yesterday were censored - but no matter, everyone else has said the same thing. The site isn't ready for publication yet, it was poorly thought out, and built on poor design principals.
Testing broad interest publications with a test market is pretty standard procedure - obviously you didn't do that here (or you let the Web 2.0 company that designed this site do it for you)
The site does look like a MySpace page. It does not look like a professional news site. It looks absolutely terrible on larger monitors (which maybe you've noticed are sort of popular), and the icons look like they were stolen from the OLPC project.
I hate MySpace.
This is particularly aimed at those who think that fixed page width is a good idea :
This is essentially about user choice, using a fixed page width forces everybody who uses a website to have the same page width, whether or not that width is appropriate to that user.
Using a flexible page width enables the user make a choice, they can set the browser window at a width that works best for them and the website will adapt to it.
El Reg : I want the ability to choose my page width back ! Stop taking away user choice.
I also feel for people using this website who have eyesight problems, fixed width designs and enlarged fonts really don't mix. This design suffers from text flowing outside of boxes and overprinting after 2 or 3 CTRL-+'s in firefox.
1) When I click in the "Password" or "Title" boxes, I don't get a cursor. Probably my fault, but given that it always used to work I just assumed your site had broken my browser.
2) A point about fixed width that no-one else seems to have mention. It forces you to make the window at least that wide. Websites that force me to use the left-right scrollbar to read text are really quite unbelievably naff. Fortunately, you've avoided this problem by choosing a microscopic font size.
3) The articles on the RHS (Reg Special Report, etc) look too much like adverts and so my brain just filtered them off your page entirely. Your web-site is now only five or six hundred pixels wide and missing precisely the content you presumably wanted to highlight.
The new site is a triumph of form over content and precisely the sort of crap that I used to read El Reg to laugh at.
I wish you could use less of screen to post stories' teasers. My using 600 of my 1440px of screen is really what I was looking for. Don't take it as being sarcastic - I really love to have big ads on the side, some ad of one of the news and big icons all over the place. It's nice. I bet all teenage girls around just "luv it".
""I'm a long-time lurker, loyal for years, and I'm horrified by this god-forsaken mess.
What used to look like a proper professional journal now looks like a cheap nasty tabloid.
Way to go guys - you just doubled your advertising space, and halved the value of it...
I hope you're proud." .... By Anonymous Coward Posted Sunday 14th September 2008 16:19 GMT.
There's nothing cheap or nasty with more than a Little of ITs Esoteric Tasty Content ....... Some Like IT Hot Sweet and Sticky. AI Prose that Grows a Library of Thoughts.
Pass that somebody a swag bag.
"The Register is a news site NOT a blog! Stop trying to look like a blog." .... WTF!!! By Not That Andrew Posted Sunday 14th September 2008 22:22 GMT
It is not an investigative news site, is it, with terrier reporters and minxy cubs looking for a Splash/Scoop/Exclusive? That would need HeavyWeight Media Funding Investment for Maintenance of Source Drivers which is What IT is Always Seeking .... Questing ..... dDelivering.:-)? There a lot of disgraced Egos out there who would Espouse "the man who dies thus rich, dies disgraced" and yet Baulk at Ascension and Concept Embrace.
Hypocrites to One and All and to Themselves the Salv of their Finding Nothing of Greater Value to Purchase ...... which is Stagnation and Recession and IT is certainly Depressing when Everything is for Sale and Sailing. It shows a Lack of Vital Spontaneous Imagination.
I've really tried to make peace with the changes to my favorite website - and overall I guess I'll have to if I want to continue to enjoy the stories...
However, I do want to say that the site is too fucking hard to read. I showed it to staff at the office today and the universal complaint was why in the hell is the font so hard to read - and what the fuck are those big gray bars? Is this site fixed width? It's a new design? That's terrible.
Aesthetics aside, the font really is difficult to read.
I also feel for people using this website who have eyesight problems
Erm, that would be me, although fortunately, just pressing CTRL+ a couple of times helps.
Also, the text colour in this comment textbox is black, which does not play at all well with the high contrast colour scheme I use on all my machines. On this one for instance, the application BG is dark blue, not white, so forcing a black font makes it virtually invisible. (I'm typing this is in a text editor)
This is unforgiveable. Especially considering that the both the login and title text boxes happily pick up my system's default text colour (a fetching shade of green reminiscent of the dusty text only terminals of yore).
This is my absolute pet hate with both applications and web sites, either pick up my system colors properly and consistently, or fucking ignore them altogether. Mixing and matching just makes it even more difficult to implement automated strategies for providing accessibiilty.
Consider yourselves properly chided for this oversight. and next time, pay someone to check your accessibility (and hence your liablility under the DDA). My rates are extremely unreasonable, but I'm sure there are some specialist consulting chaps in that London who will be able to help you out.
Fixed Width a problem?
What, you expect the be able to change the size of your telly to fit different-format programmes? You expect the Times to be printed on different sizes of paper?
Text too small?
Use your browser to change the text size. Or get specs.
Agree with the icons, though. And glad too see their back.
Paris, because she too favours a fixed width (if only we knew what it was...)
Just tried a small experiment, I downloaded the reg home page and with a few quick edits to the style sheet I now have the page rendering to the width of the browser fairly well, with the other headlines flowing to fit the available space. For good measure I moved the teaser headline box so that it was directly under the main headline. It looks so much better for just a few minutes work. Come on el-reg, you know you can do it !
The Bad:
- fixed width === bleh
- small fonts === double-bleh
- grey walls of impending death === not very presentable.
- masthead === fugly
The quick fix:
- view the site with styles-sheets turned off (Firefox).
The good, some icons are back:
- Paris and the _old_ good and bad Gates, Jobs, the "I'll get my coat" and the mArTiaN är back. Yea!!!
Now a note from our sponsors (the spelling-bees):
@Solomon Grundy Posted Monday 15th September 2008 15:22 GMT
"(...)it was poorly thought out, and built on poor design principals."
I think you meant principles.
The new 'masthead' logo is a bit naff compared to the old version, but on the whole it looks ok. My only real issue with it is the fixed width (like others have already said).
It's especially stupid when viewed on my 2560 x 1600 monitor, as it's displays as a tiny little block of content in the centre of my browser surrounded by a pointless sea of grey.
At least the old version scaled to fit my browser window.
The fixed width didn't bother me at all on the laptop, it fits quite nicely into the size of my browser window. But as soon as I tried it on my N800 - yeah, I'm with everyone else. It's horrible.
Pretty happy with the rest of the changes, was a bit of a shock when I first saw it but I'm getting used to it now. Just sort out the fixed width. Please....
El Reg listens!
We got our icons back - well, some of 'em. The Vultures listen to their punters - can't say fairer than that, people.
Now that you've given us Paris, can we have Sarah back pronto please?
BTW, getting used to the new look already.
(Paris - just because I can)
I'm getting used to the new layout, but the comments link on articles no longer stands out. I can't easily see if there are any comments on a story, and sometimes forget it's even there. I'll get used to it, but I think new readers may not even notice it (but maybe that was the point?).
Also, glad to see the proper Paris icon returned, all though I think I liked the new iFan / iHate icons better.
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I recoiled at first, but then I noticed that by adjusting my window width just so, I can see all the stories and no ads. The comment form has text leaking out past the nice line boxes, though. (Firefox 3.01 + NoScript, on XP).
Phooey on the change of comment icons! I especially miss the dead vulture.
Why OFn why? I know your logo's red, but did you have to make it look as tabloid as the recent SUNning of Sky News' site?
Atleast put 4 columns across and fill a better bit of the screen. If anyone's still using VGA, screw-'em. And for iPhone trolls, try to give them content that does whatever's the equivalent of an 'unhappy Mac'.
Haven't read the other comments just spun through to get the general sentiment via the icons.
OK, now to ensure I don't entirely P you guys off (I take it you like it) - lovely to see that you've murdered that little annoying b@$t@rd - The Crazy Frog.
... and the tiny fonts, but most of all I resent the 33% wasted white space down the right hand side. I think Verity Stob's opinion of the new page design would be interesting.
For what it's worth, my first reaction on loading the Reg today was to check and see why Adblock wasn't working. Further research showed that it was working just fine, and you f'ed up the page format just to place some internal links. But if you lose the fixed width it won't be so bad.
Ahhh... let us draw a deep breath.
After all the fruit-bashing the Reg imitates Apple,
http://www.theregister.co.uk/
- (Fixed width and jumbled content)
... (/unsmiling icon)
Compare:
http://www.apple.com/itunes/
... (/unsmiling icon)
- (Fixed width and jumbled content)
Bring on the fruitiness... El Reg!!!
Bring it on!!!
// - Paris, because she knows strange fruit...
If that was what was needed to get back to fluid width. Fixed width for Web 2.0 designs works great for sites who are very light on content, but thats just not the case here.
Reading El Reg is just not as good now, and I am already reading less.
Paris, because she is used to being dumped after the fluids have been expended.
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All the changes are ok, generally sprucing up the site (and I dont give a fat rats arse about the icons) but ......
FIXED WIDTH ??????
Down with the Reg Style Nazis !
Aunty Beeb can spruce up without resorting to fixed width, why cant you ? Ok, there might be a SLIGHT difference in budget.
Not happy about having to hit Ctrl+ every time I visit.
To make it less-ugly and more readable... just use a 52 inxh DLP@ 1024x768. I can axtually read it now and the annoying grey bars don't consume huge swaths of screen realestate. Of course it's kind of an expensive solution, not something you go out and buy just so you can read the Reg.
At first, I said "HOLY SHIT!" and thought I'd typed in the wrong address
Then, I realised that it was the reg, and that the site had been redesigned. after a minute or so to get my bearings, all was well. It'll take some getting used to, but I'm sure I'll grow to like it almost as much as the old, distinctive look...
...then I noticed that there were these two grey bars down the side of the page, and realised that you'd gone with the abomination of broken design that is fixed width.
I run at 1024x768, so it looks as intended for me, but I despise fixed width on principle - fixed width = broken - you're going against one of the core principles of web design, which is that users control the size of the viewing area. As an IT-centric site, you guys should already know this, and therefore using this abomination of poor design is inexcusable. Fixed width will make me visit less on principle.
As somebody who's built more than a few web pages in my time, I understand that having a resizable client area can be a pain in the ass from a designer's perspective, but it's really not that hard to cope with.
The new favicon is very cool, but it looks terrible in my RSS reader - there are a few white pixels bordering on the transparency which give it a wierd outline when it's not being viewed on a white background.
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I like it. A little wider with slightly bigger text would be just perfect - perhaps those could be clickable options on the top bar. Also, the grey at the side is so light as to be distracting (The "Don't Miss" section at the bottom is a nicer grey, for example) - it is constantly leading the eye away from the main content. Dizzying. :) The new vulture favicon does not look nice against a black-themed browser toolbar either. This is all small stuff though, really. Well done to everyone who pushed it all out so speedily, it's presented very nicely.
El Reg just looks and operates like any other run-of-the-mill website now. It's no big deal, I can navigate any site, click any link and generally find what I need. If that doesn't work with this website I'll just leave and find others to frequent.
There is too much content on the web and too many sites pushing it at us to get disturbed over what any one site does or does not do. I'm adaptable and that adaptability includes leaving.
On reason I became a frequent visitor of The Register was because msnbc.com wrecked their site and by chance Stumbleupon brought me here. Others had too many pop-ups and/or pop-unders. I hope El Reg can continue to avoid those but generally, in my experience, significant visual changes are soon followed by other changes and the sites "new thinking" takes over.
Seriously, One of the things I liked about El Reg. was the fact that it auto scaled the screen to fit my 1400X900 screen to efficiently fill the screen width (doing the zoom thing just makes the text bigger as well as generate defuse jaggies on all of the graphics ie.. zoomed. Blaaa.
I hope you figure out your issues well, but the 800 X whatever rollover is primitive.
Not becoming such a fine and literate collection of techno guru's :)
I thought that the smashed IT bird was cute, if somewhat brutal, poor little thing.
Except for the left justified vs centered aspect ratio between the inquirer and now your IT news thingy... I don't know were in the world to go, Perhaps I will just jump off of the London bridge. Arizona is not that far away.
.. and may make further tweaks. After playing with it for a couple of days, here's some feedback.
I'll add my tally to the "get rid of fixed width" campaigners. It really is silly that once you scroll below the ads to only be using about 1/4 of the available screen. It's a triumph of form over function.
The other changes are generally good. Shoving the ads off to the side is an improvement to having them sprawled in the middle of articles, the new masthead looks nice and a slightly smaller font is a bit more "grown-up" looking.
Nope. Doesn't work for me. I find it harder to read, the whole look is "in your face" busy and I'm with the guy complaining about the grey down each side. What's the use of widescreen monitors if some cretin insists on presenting fixed-format text?
I'm sure you could improve on your original layout, but this is not the way to go.
BRING BACK OUR REG!!
On my big monitor it looks hideous
But on my EEE it is just plain annoying, what with a third of the page being off screen.
I spent a few years designing web apps for my employers and taking great care they fitted the range of set-ups that we had including the magnifiers for the visually impaired (which I sort of count as now as I come to thing of it)
So why the f*** fixed width?
ack to a width that adpts to the browser window please
Hmmm....
Could someone post up somewhere the complete set of old vs. new, so those of us that missed out on the temporary replacement of Paris, Steve and Bill can see for ourselves how hideous they were?
I quite like the new thumbs up and down, not too sure about the new heart and gravestone, hate the new flame and Jolly Roger. I notice the favicon's reverted to white vulture in black circle, as opposed to grey vulture on transparent (as spotted in my infoRSS feed).
As for ads - what ads? The marketing dept. will hate me, but I have ABP permanently enabled...
As for fixed width, surely it wouldn't be too hard to add some code that checks for the screen width, and if it's a small screen, display in fixed-width (to avoid crunching everything up to unreadable proportions), and if it's a large screen, display in %-width.
Thumbs down, as it's one of the few decent new icons, and conveys my sentiments better than the onion (sorry, new look flame)...
We get it - you have a widescreen monitor - good for you. *high five's* I have a widescreen monitor too, and you know, it looks fine, not evil greyness on my screen really - why? Because I don't have to have the browser window maximised just to read a news article.
To call the designers "cretins" because the site doesn't adapt to your perfect little monitor is just rude - yes, maybe fixed width was a bad idea, so let them know with a +1 vote, but stop being big babies about it and acting like it's the end of the world, because it's not the end of the world - I personally am not a fan using it in my sites, but obviously it looked better than the alternative when they tried it during development.
*in the style of a youtube idiot* LEAVE EL REG ALONE, ANYONE WHO HAS A PROBLEM WITH HER YOU DEAL WITH ME *runs off crying*
PS - what happened to the weekly comment's section - we've not had any since the end of August.
Evil Jobs - because he's ruined theregister for me by giving me a widescreen monitor. Now I'm going to have to buy a standard monitor, like most other office workers, to view the site in all it's glory.
Would it be boring to say I don't like the fixed width presentation?
Well OK I don't read El Reg in the full 3200 pixels of my multi-screen display, but I would like the choice.
Are you listening at Vulture Central? Have you understood that everyone hates it?
And you could have taken the opportunity to add an Eee girl icon.
I'm in that very late 20s to early 30s category, don't wear glasses, and on my laptop screen the font sizes are killing my eyes. Don't like the fixed width, either, I have my browser set to the width I like, and now el reg is just wasting a ton of space.
Instead of changing it back, how about giving us an option to have the old view if preferred?
Ok fair crack of the whip so far. I saw the release on Sunday and after a strong coffee, decided to give it a few days.
I don't like it.
I'm sorry, I really am, but it's just little things. The old format generally gave every story the same level playing field on the front page. Now the new format forces a 'top' story on readers. Working in Radio I'm trained not to 'spoon feed' the audience. El Reg seem to be doing this now and it grates on me. I can read, and I don't need telling what to look at. Tho maybe thats the Nanny-State filtering into El Reg now? I just feel it insults my intelligence.
The new icons on Comments are are ghastly. Really, really ghastly.
The width issues, well 'nuff said about that really so far, but I've also got to flag up my dislike.
I think what I most Loved about the (original) Reg was it had the same look & feel as a Red-Top. The layout was comfortable, much like reading a paper, be it at my desktop or sitting on the bog with my mobile (insert smutty pun here as desired).
There was also a feeling that the El Reg team preferred content over design. As the web gets so full of crud and shitty Flash and so on, there was still a site that cared more about a plain readable site with great content, than a bunch of Joss Stick weirdos trying to look Web2.1.
The Reg has lost several things that made it so Loved (speaking only for myself here).
Please put away the whale song, go back out onto the streets, pick up a damned awful red-top (you know, the ones that sell in their millions), and think. Then have another re-design.
However, what I must give credit for, is listening. It's a refreshing change that someone is listening. Perhaps John Lettice for Prime Minister?
Cretin may have been harsh, I was in a hurry. As it happens I'm viewing this on a 4x3 monitor and I still have grey bands because I don't want to reduce the window width to accommodate just this site. There is rarely a good reason to force fixed width text on a webpage but unfortunately it is becoming more and more prevalent - like the use of flash for static content/menus.
and fixed width is just lazy coding (800px is positively prehistoric). Please get rid of it, along with those insipid new icons.
"looks more like ... the inquirer" Yes, it does. This is not a good thing.
While I'm here, you really should make the "Preview comment" show the icon too, as it alters the layout of the comment.
...is that there's no easily clickable way to get back to the main theregister.co.uk homepage after posting a comment on something on reghardware, for example. There's no link back and the only way to do it is either via the back button history, or typing the URL in again (or favourites, obv.). Sort it out lads, it's basic web design, innit?
What's all the fuss? I like the new reg, I have two large monitors and it looks fine to me in all my web browsers (FF, IE, Chrome, Safari). Instead of f'ing and jeff'ing about things, perhaps people could make considered more polite responses? I wish people actually got excited about things that really matter instead. It also seems silly to use capitals to get your point across...
On another note: I hope reported problems for people with accessibility requirements are addressed, and perhaps those with PDAs/phones...
"Thumbs up" because I like it so there....
I've just opened a page onto the Channel Register, which is still using the old format, and realised that it is not just the width that makes the new pages so unattractive. The font sizes have changed and the line spacing has been reduced.
For me at least this makes the pages significantly more difficult to read.
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I'll say more once I have tried the new site on NetSurf, but I can sympathise with those that complain about fixed width. It flies in the face of all that has been said and done wrt accessibility.
And yes, the new icons also suck. Redesign if you must, but please don't do it at the expense of your users!
I'll admit that the layout of the site is growing on me. It looks nicer than before, but one of the things I liked about the old site was the non-shiny design.
Still not too sure about the front page where I now see fewer stories in a smaller font before I scroll down.
The fixed width is also a little annoying since now I can't hide a reg article I want to read in a narrow window and pretend it is the help file for whatever program I am using.
As to the icons - the reappearance of the old photo icons is great, but I still want the old flame, pirate and dead vulture logos back. The rest are fine although I think making the colours a little brighter so the new icons don't look so washed out might be nice.
The banner on the top is good but I can't actually read the text below the "The Register", it looks to me like a large white blob rather than actual text.
Finally I just noticed that the new special report section might need a quite play with since I am getting multiple "adverts" for the same story using different pictures. By all means have a number of possible pictures for each story, but try to ensure that only one appears on each page...
you freakin whiners .. it's set to work for 1024px width and so the main content can fit in 800px
so .. have any of you actually tried to design a site to *fit* from 1024px (still the most common) to a ridiculous 2560px ? .. *and* make the design look good too ?
small font ? .. no it's fine .. your resolution is too high for the purpose ..
basics folks .. fonts work based on 72px per inch .. you make 72px only half an inch on your high res screen and OF COURSE the font's will look too small .. you should be able to bump up the font size however to fix that
it's *the* trade off of webdesign .. and why so many sites look the same ..
with fixed width .. you can control the layout and look 100% ..
with percentage widths and ALOT more work and testing .. you can usually keep the site looking decent from 1024px > 1280px .. but it will likely suffer at 1600px, if for no other reason than the graphics become too small in relation to other elements, particularly on high res wide screen displays on laptops .. you might have bragging rights to your 1600px width on a 15.4" laptop screen .. ( better than HD res !! .. woohoo !!) , however if you expect 10pt or 12pt font to be readable on it, you're going to be disappointed
large widescreen high resolution screens are made for gaming and movie watching .. not for reading your e-mail or websurfing , unless you have a very large screen and know how to set your window size !
oh .. just get RID of the stupid icons .. they are definitely a 1998 Web 1.2 idea that's *ok* for personalised *avatar* pics on forums .. however *comments* have value (or not) due to thier content .. stupid generic icons add nothing of real value, and help the trolls draw attention to themselves
O/T, and I'll get shot down in flames, but I've got to say it.
I quite like the new FB layout - I've been testing it for a couple of months now; and even before I'd customised it to severely limit the cr*p ending up in my newsfeed. However, what I don't like is them sneaking changes out without flagging them up beforehand, like removing the "Applications" menu and making it a floating toolbar at the bottom of the screen...
In amongst the numerous comments left by FB'ers in response to the development during the development period, there were quite a few people supporting the changes, as well as people moaning about the integration of wall and mini-feed. But of course with any change to any site, the number of people publicly moaning will always be higher than the number of people publicly praising, regardless of how good/bad the changes are.
However, if El Reg had done an FB and had some form of consulation before rolling out the changes, then maybe, just possibly maybe, they wouldn't have had the comment icon farce (although they'd probably still want to stick to the new fixed-width layout - after all, as with FB, some proposed changes will always be "sacred" and will be implemented regardless of what users say).
Well I thought I'd leave it a couple of days, try and get used to the new layout, let my eyes adjust to the (irritating) grey bars down the side, even spend time reading some of the articles.
But...
Noooooooooooooooo - this is not working - I have to agree with everyone who has said that fixed width sucks - have any of your designers head of widescreen - try putting the site on a 1600x1050 screen. And as for the icons - the less said the better.
Hurry up and fix what you broke.
you don't get it do you.
If you want to read it in a window, fine, but NOT EVERYONE DOES THAT!
I (and many others) want to read the site fullscreen. Fixed width takes away my choice, you Are Not The Only Person Who Reads The Site, and if fixed width just happens to be fixed exactly at the width you happen to like having your browser window at, bully for you, but I DON'T HAVE MY BROWSER WINDOW SET THE SAME AS YOU! I read el reg both on my widescreen monitor, FULLSCREEN, COS THATS HOW I LIKE IT, and on my phone, AND FIXED WIDTH MAKES BOTH _HORRIBLE_. Variable width means the site fills the window, HOWEVER WIDE THE WINDOW HAPPENS TO BE. your window on a widescreen monitor would look the same, my fullscreen window on a widescreen monitor would *use all the available space*, and my phone *wouldn't have to scroll five million miles sideways* in order to read the site. just because, by happy coincidence, the fixed width *Happens* to be the right width for your preferred window width, doesn't mean it suits others. Get some fucking Clue before you make sweeping claims again.
sorry for the rant.
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After 24 hours of looking at the new site, my main concern is the readability of articles. The dodgy masthead (it is fuzzy and cramped - you could happily let it breathe more - look what the BBC get away with....) I can live with. The fixed width is survivable - l understand why you did it, and I do it myself, and although I still hate it, it doesn't stop me coming back to the site.
BUT - the readability of the bally articles is no-where near what it was with the old site. That is a serious problem and one I really think you should consider fixing. Some sites (arstech as I recollect) have a font size toggle. It is stored to a cookie. It need not apply to the front page or the various sections (where it would screw up your formatting probably and generally be a pain in the arse) but if it were available for article elements of article pages it would make a VERY big difference.
Are your page views per reader up? If so - great - vindication - but for this reader page views are definitely down as it is just too hard to READ the bally thing. Yes, I can increase font size in my browser - but if I have to do that for your site, and no other site on the net, then your end is broke, not mine.
PS - the paler grey on the sidebars is an improvement.
two, infact. First, in Opera 9.52/mac the email/password/title boxes of the add comment form don't show a cursor until you start typing.
Also, for multi-page stories, the big bold *Next Page: foo* at the bottom of each page should be a link to the next page, not just the small page no/next links in the grey bar.
ps fixed width=shit
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It isn't up to Mr. Hemsley to determine which products I purchase (meaning if I have a big fucking monitor I want the on-screen content to fill the whole thing).
The analogy you are drawing is the same as saying "well, I have a 50" plasma TV but it's OK if you want to make movies that only use 2/3 of the space. I like spending money for nothing.)
The text/width ratio on the old site was perfectly fine and extremely readable; it used the available screen space and no one was complaining. So you can take your not possible and go home 'cause we've all seen it work.
I seem to have been censored last time I vented my spleen.
Possibly for calling the re-designer a whalesong listening crackhead, I'm not sure...
Quote="Our thanks to all The Register staff, particularly Aaron and Murray, for all the extra work they've put into the project. Special thanks also to designer and strategy boutiquester Malcolm Casimir of April Strategy for his efforts to save us from style catastrophe."
Not so sure you were saved from a syle catastophe, more like betrayed for a 30 peice silver cased josstick and whalesong relaxation set.
OK, its looking better (Wide Screen, screams silently at its loss of something to do.)
However, I do see progress in other aspects of the site.
...Were is the dead bird? Is political correctness getting in the way of true feelings?
I suspect a conspiracy of gentrified pleasantry.
MY BROWSER SEEMS SLOWER NOW WHAT HAS YOUR WEBPAGE DONE TO MY COMPUTER NOW I'M GOING TO PICK ONE DAY A WEEK AND NOT GO TO YOUR WEB SITE YOU JUST WAIT YOU'LL BE SORRY I MAY HAVE TO ACTIVATE MY EVIL BOTNETS I'M SURE THE ALIENS ARE IN ON THIS PROBABLY PROGRAMMING OUR MINDS OH EL REG YOU HAVE FALLEN UNDER THE CONTROL OF THE BLACK HELICOPTERS
Reg, you look.. all professional and shit. I loved the old style for it's uncompromising "i wrote this site in notepad" look, and now you've gone and turned it into some kind of goddamn news site.
What I'd really like to know is where I can purchase the whalesong cds used to come up with the new logo.
Re the linking from Hardware/channel etc - at the top of the article there is a little red Reg/Vulture button, next to the 'comments' link which does take you back to the main Reg site, but I only realised this after I had emailed my thoughts on it to Mr Lettice [as it wasn't really relayed to the reaction to the redesign, i.e this article, directly], whereupon he pointed it out the wee button to me!
I hope he doesn't mind me posting that it will be looked at [among other things] when hardware/Channel get updated as well - you'll notice their still set up 'old school'.
Glad I'm not the only person who gets annoyed at clicking back twelve times to get back to the main page, and I'm glad the Reg C&C take note of our strange little foibles like that - one of the reasons I keep coming back here is that 99% of the time, if I have had a reasonable point to make to one of the staffers here, and make it in a reasonable manner, I get a reply before the end of the day. And I'm not a trade rep, industry bigwig or owt like that - I just read the site and occasionally talk trash in the comment sections, like everyone else here.
That's looking after your customer/client base, that is.
Steven R
I find it's extremely hard to read as the adverts are so huge etc that their colour etc overpowers the page and is a horrible distraction that makes your page VERY uncomfortable to read.
It's not a matter of not liking change or giving it time to get used to it, it actually gives me a headache trying to concentrate on it.
Fixed width designed for a screensize of 1024 in 2008?
I'm running at 1920x1200
Not had a good chance to look at the site until now but I agree fully with what Double Dekkers had to say.
Fixed width is a work around not a solution to whatever problem you're experiencing with css.
The other thing that really poor is that the width is 960 pixels and you've chosen to use just 600 pixels for articles. 60 pixels are wasted on borders and padding etc, and then you have a f'kin 300 pixel wide advert!?!?
The new layout is toilet!
The main problem I had with el Reg 1.0 was the page load times were slow (but worth the wait) as it dragged in all the Scientology adverts that needed to be incorporated. el Reg 2.0 seems to have improved load times BUT it begins displaying with large empty banner at the top and just as you're about to click on an article, it disappears and everything shuffles up the page. Bloody annoying.
Other than that, I like it.
That's caused by something we do to avoid page loads stalling. We try to load the content first, so the reader gets the page without having to wait until an external ad server gets around to sending a banner. If you do it the other way round, a slow or screwed ad server can bring the whole show to a halt, and there's nothing you can do about it.
I'm not sure there's a great deal we can do about the shuffle, but we'll take a look.
So I've been getting used to the new layout, but there's something still bothering me (apart from the flame icon, and I haven't dared try it on my mobile yet).
The line spacing is wrong, particularly on the main page. Somehow it makes it look spacious and crowded at the same time. And I just figured out why: there's too much vertical space between the lines of an article heading, but not enough space between articles. So the article category, the header, the one line teaser, and the category and header of the next article all flow into each other. There needs to be more of a separation between articles.
Maybe it's just me, but the side box containing (lovely addition by the way) seems to be behaving very strangely. When not on the front page. The Top Stories tab dissapears, the Most Read tab seems to show random stories that were popular at the time the current article was written. I hope this isn't by design.
With the fixed width - whilst I am not opposed to the idea (it can work superbly for news sites) I feel you have missed a trick by not taking the opportunity to reduce the amount of articles on the front page and encourage people to visit the subcategories to find new stories that are more editorially relevant.
Why not try and make the front page special - pick 10 top stories (breaking news, popular, editorial etc). The list of articles should end where the first grey teaser sits. After that you can put links to reports and whitepapers - and people may actually bother scrolling to look at them.
Why not give each sub-section a featured article - give this article a slightly larger image and larger font. Give each section an identity by softly changing the layout, linking to different content (e.g. Whitepapers in the Business section) and most importantly, make it feel like it's worth visiting each sections lest you miss out on interesting content.
You could argue this is not the way of El Reg, that you like the format which essentially equates to dumping all the stories on the front page and letting the user act as thier own editor - here the categories just act as glorified filters. Which would be fine... if you had not chose fixed width and destroyed the mechanism that allowed this to work.
PS: Fixed pixel font sizes? Seriously? Did you CSS guy layout this site using Publisher?
OK, at first I thought this new look was pretty good. After this lunch I have changed my mind...
At lunch I often have a browse through your stories. However, I often turn the font size up so I can sit back and relax while doing so (especially with BOFH)
Not any more. Your new site wont let me.
I agree with the headline: OMFG, what have you done?
guys, the page links (links to page 2, 3 etc) are still screwed. I'm using IE. I see they have moved from the bottom right to now the bar above the article, but 1) we need them at the bottom of the article (so you don't have to scroll back up to the top once you read it to go to the next page and so you know there are more pages!) and 2) they are currently on top of something else, possible a 'rate this article'? do you have that? I can't tell. But as i've said, they really need to go on the 'post a comment' bar.
cheers.
Now I have to rewrite my "make the Reg site style not suck" Greasemonkey script.
"What sucks about it?", you ask -- there's all this ugly distracting crap in the way of my reading, that's what sucks about it. I'd written a nice long detailed script to make all the dribbling side panels and interstitial garbage and this and that and the other bloody syphilitic thing go away, so that I'd have this nice clean page with a bright red masthead at the top and a news story below that -- and now I'm going to have to redo the whole thing, like as not, just to make the Reg once again a site that I can read without my eyeballs trying to run away and hide.
Ah, well. Out with the old suckage, in with the new.
(Think I might have the new version put the "Special Report" sidebar panels up at the top between masthead and story, tho. Those are potentially kinda neat, which is a new thing for the contents of the Reg sidebars; and if I can scroll them out of my field of view, then they magically cease to annoy me.)
I have commented on my dislike of the new look previously, but I have really tried to get along with the new layout. However, it is genuinely giving me eyestrain. On a 1600x1200 monitor the text is simply too small to read from my normal working distance. Reg hardware text is a lot better - different font/size/spacing and channel register is a pleasure because it still flows to the width I want. Overall, though, my reading of register artticles has dropped from most to occasional.
The best workaround I've found so far is to put opera into user mode, which chucks out all the fancy formatting and makes the articles quite readable. Unfortunately it totally screws up the front page and makes things hard to find.
Please please remember that there are people out here who are not using small laptops. Also, you are a digital medium, it is really not necessary for you to look anything like a newspaper (especially a tabloid). Your new front page layout is far too busy, things are splashed all over the place (the headline stories in the middle of the page disrupt the appearance) and when a sidebar is nearly 50% of the width it ceases to be a sidebar. I'm currently using a separate window for the reg and sizing it down so I only see the text (completely defeating any purpose the sidebar thing might have had) simply to reduce the clutter
The computer "desktop" is meant to reflect your real life desktop.
Do you refuse to read a book because it doesn't cover the whole table ? Do you take a sheet of A1 to write your shopping list ? When you take a photo, do you zoom on the subject or just take a panorama shot every time ?
There are several types of computer users, but I have always found that those who don't get it, are most likely to have a window maximised, no matter what that window contains. I think it comes down to not being able to concentrate on more than one thing at once.
If you don't like it, CREATE YOUR OWN SITE ! Then you might come across others who deplore your choices in every respect. Who do you change your site for ? You can't please everybody, so you make it as accessible as possible. Having 20 lines of text spread across a 1600 width screen isn't my idea of useable.
Did you know that you can do things like drag and drop between applications when you don't have every window maximised ? Or did that useful piece of design escape you completely ? Then again, you probably have to use the mouse and the edit menu to copy and then again to paste. God forbid you use the keyboard for anything other than hunt and peck.
Finally, did you know you can choose not to use the style imposed by the site ? (hint- look in the view menu on firefox). And you can easily zoom text using ctrl+scroll wheel ?
Whiners indeed.
I browse the site through my nokia n95, I also read it on my office machine, which isn't widescreen, and my laptop - which is. 3 different browsers, 3 different operating systems, 3 different screen sizes - and yes, the fixed width bugs me too, just like many others. I can't view fullscreen, which I used to, I can't view as easily on my phone, which it used to well, and it works fairly well on my office machine. But just because I'm not enjoying the new fixed-width, doesn't really mean I should belittle somebody's work with aggressive sometimes personal comments towards the developers, which is what I kept seeing people doing over and over - I've registered my problems with the design and then left it at that.
So grow up, stop being dramatic, it's just a news site ffs (although the best), don't assume you know me and make assumptions of how I do things - and just take the spirit of my original comment, which is to not be overly rude or personally attack the developers of the new design.
But to be honest, I'm sure the developers are big boys (and girls... maybe) and are adult enough to take the comments on the chin, I just know if I spent months on a design and then had 300+ fairly upset commenters saying how crap it was because it doesn't stretch on their particular monitor I would possibly take it a little personally! But for safety I withdraw my previous comment, lest it bring the angry mob of widescreen commentors running at me, monitors in hand, to relieve me of my teeth! :)
PS - I know not all people who complained about fixed-width were rude about it, some were very civil indeed.
PPS - I know el reg invited the criticms/comments, and judging by the article headline they were expecting to be flamed too...
PPPS - Teletubbie roasting like a marshmallow, because like it, I am done.
<bow>
Dear Sirs,
as of today, and after taking some flack from your readers, your site's look is just perfect: a touch of web 2.0 over the good ol' site.
The "fixed width" whining is an nonsense. How someone could possibly like reading a paragraph that is more than 450px width, is beyond human comprehension.
The population of most read on the section pages is currently the most read stories in that section. The front page one has various weirdisms in it, and we're going to have to nail down the parameters properly and work out how we can label/explain what it's supposed to do. Er, just as soon as I know... (-:
Part of the intention with the new layout was to do something pretty much like you suggest. We're not quite achieving this yet, partially because at least one part of the placement process is cumbersome to use, and we need to get a better one coded, and partially because we're not yet entirely used to the new approach that's needed.
I'm glad you mentioned sections though. If you look at the Hardware section, you'll see we're running a lead and section-specific teasers there. We can also set section-specific Special Reports there, although at the moment it's running the site defaults set for the front page.
We can switch this functionality on for other sections in a twizzle, and we'll roll out a couple more over the next couple of weeks. But we don't want to do it for a section unless we've got a specific in-house custodian for it, so the burden of picking stories doesn't get insane.
If you want to make the font size and line spacing larger in stories (only) it is easy to create a stylesheet for it. Not ideal - but the difference in usability is amazing.
Here is what you do for Mac Safari (other browsers have similar functionality...)
Make a textfile called, e.g. "regfix.css"
Type:
#body p {font: normal 16px/24px arial;}
in it, and save. (normal font, 16px with 24px spacing, arial. Change it to whatever you like. The Reg currently uses a div with id "body" for the body of stories...)
In Safari: Preferences > Advanced > Stylesheet.
Tell it where your CSS file is. Then close the browser and reopen it - and navigate back to a story. All being well - legible stories!
Nope, you're wrong.
Just because the new, fixed-width site happens to fit perfectly your ideal, precisely measured and feng shui perfect window on your exact monitor, DOESN'T mean that it will work as well for anyone else. A flow-to-fit-window site would look EXACTLY THE SAME in your utopian browser window, but would also work fullscreen on my (small, widescreen) laptop, on SCC's, on mobile browsers, and on any other browser. On a small widescreen, there really isn't room to stuff about with multiple windows, the extra horizontal real estate is counteracted by a corresponding lack ov vertical space. The old site used the *area* available on screen, the new, fixed width uses the *Height*. I have 800 pixels of height to use, 1280 wide. the site doesn't use the available screen space, so I (and All the others complaining) have space wasted, and hence have to scroll more to obtain the same amount of info. As a quick comparison, frontpage now vs internet archived old frontpage, both fullscreen (how i always read the web), including featured stories but not Top Stories (as that duplicates main story links) old site i have 20 story links visible on screen at once, new site only 13. This is _incrdibly_ annoying, and makes picking out stories to read, and not missing things, very much harder. Variable width/fit to window allows the user to choose the size of the visible, useful window. You can have your perfectly proportioned browser, everyone else can size the site As They See Fit, according to circumstance. I don't want to have to horizontal scroll on SCC's, or vertical scroll more than necessary on my small laptop widescreen. Please try to understand. HTH, HAND.
thank god for the ctrl+fix. Layout has never been a particular strength of El Reg....
I have to agree with the commenters out there: the icons are awfull... a heart with a smiley in it? wtf...
I say time for an icon contest. A C64 icon anyone?
black 'copter cos... well its an instant Reg classic :)
I don't know about the "Flashy Monitor" brigade mentioned above, but at £200-250 for a decent 1920x1280 resolution screen alot more people have them now. And really they are massive grey bars on each side. Surely El'Reg has shelled out a bit on some decent monitors for you guys? And surely you noticed those massive grey bars during a bit of internal UAT?
The redesign is fine, probably long overdue. Not sure it will live up to longivity of the last design - dated before its released maybe? But overall it's not too bad tho I think.
Anyway ... thumbs down from me just because of the fixed width. Need to sort that out ElReg!
I'm in the market for a new truck and I have specific wants (lots of them), and a few real needs. I went to my favorite showroom today and sat my scrawny butt in numerous models I was very familiar with. Nothing there seemed to fit quite right; I was really bummed out. Then my bride saved me.
She said, "Lets go to the dealership across the street and look there." Lifted me completely out of my oilwell-deep funk and brought me back to my usual cheery self. Imagine that. I could actually go to other dealers looking for what I want. Will wonders ever cease?
Hi,
I am autistic and I find the new font, size and layout almost impossible to read. The old layout and font were easy. I never had that problem before.
A lot of my trouble is caused by the grey bar of featured articles that lives under the first three lines of stories. Please will you put all the stories together and put that bar back up the top where it used to be?
Thanks.
More of the good old icons are back!
Well done, El Reg :)
Oh, and regarding the suggestions made by AC (Close...): I don't agree, really. I'd like to see (almost) all stories appear on the front page first, as well as in their respective categories - so yes, the categories act as a filter. I want to be able to the front page, and see all the new stuff, rather than having to drill down into all the subcategories to see if there's anything interesting in any of them that I might want to read.
And finally, to those complaining about those complaining about fixed width:
(1) Yes, not maximising your browser helps, but remember that non-fixed width works for everyone; fixed-width doesn't, or requires adaptation of your normal habits;
and (2) fixed width isn't just a problem for bigger screens, but also for smaller screens (most of the complainers about complainers don't seem to be realising this simple fact)
We've tried posting direct to section in the past, and have found that generally it's a waste of time, so we'll be continuing to have practically everything appear on the front page. And on average, stories will stay on the front page for about as long as they did previously.
By being able to present and drive the sections better, however, we think stories there will perform a little better, people will find more stuff that interests them once they get into the site, and will therefore tend to hang around for longer.
As for smaller and bigger screens, yes we accept that the approach we've taken creates problems for us there, but we'll be working on dealing with them.
Well, for some reason, it looks like the design went *backwards* ... the grey sidebars especially remind me of sites designed back in the 1990's...
I like some of the other improvements, but the new logo on the Header and Footer is *JUST AWFUL*. It would look 10 times better if it had a border, or restore the black circle behind the buzzard... it looks terribly pixellated as well.
For those of us with big screens, please could you provide an optional fluid width layout? The news items on the front page could flow to fit a wider space with ease (well, inline-block and some fiddling for IE and Firefox). After some time you could count how many "votes" you get for the default fixed width and the optional fluid layout.
Good - you brought some of the old icons back - they had meaning so it's nice to see them again - and those that have been replaced have improved IMO.
Bad - feels a bit soul-less, it's clear enough I suppose but it doesn't really stand out from the crowd any more. There are usability issues too, it's kind of hard to know exactly where you are without having to hunt round the page (always a bad sign). Buttons don't feel button-y, headings don't feel heading-y, the eye isn't drawn in as it should be, looks like it was designed by someone doing design-by-numbers rather than an actual designer.
Rubbish - if you're going to fill a whacking great column with adverts at least allow us to use the whole screen. A minimum width doesn't work because it discriminates against those using pdas and small browsers. It doesn't scale properly. Having it fixed like this feel claustrophobic especially with the grey columns at the side forming a kind of vertical postbox effect. Again design by committee rather than by aesthetic.
It also feels cluttered. It feels as though a great deal of screen space is being wasted with padding and spacing and margins.
So:
front page. Heading: nice enough I suppose but one of the hallmarks of The Register was the centred banner under which everything hangs. Now it's to one side. Ho hum.
some writing that tells you the sorts of things on the site... no wait - those are clickable - I had to think and hover with mouse... bad usability. Still when I go into a sub-section it h.... no it doesn't highlight or change colour or anything so I don't know which subsection I am in. This is not good. Back to the front page.
big story across the top... ok I suppose but there's a BIIIIIG margin around the image and a BIIIIIIIIG margin round the text
I
guess
it
must just be easier to read
text
laid out like this....
or maybe not
so in the left column we have all the stories - with their equally spacious titles and headings...
and on the right we have the world's biggest "most read / emailed / commented" widget. Do me a favour - do a traffic check - who uses these? Does anyone? They must because it's enormous but I know I don't and struggle to come across anyone else who does. Who cares what's popular? What matters is what is relevant. Of course the "popularity" widget has to be big just to accommodate all the spaces
at the side of the columns in the margins.
Special reports - looks nice, well done.
Job stuff - handy, very good, very useful given that we've all lost our jobs in the latest phase of the credit crunch...
Then we have bits at the bottom with a nice subdivision of the main column into two columns that is quite a nice effect to have at the bottom (note to self - will "borrow" that design idea).
My main criticism - it looks too busy. If you pulled in the space a little and made items fill their designated areas more naturally it might be easier on the eye. And if you didn't have these migraine-inducing grey bars on the side we might stay here longer.
Some small number of register story pages have the top (Print/Post/Track/Share/multi-page/whatever) head line that seems to have mushed the Print and Share tags, overlaying each other specifically making Print unavailable.
Example: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/14/virtual_safety/
God almighty - Johnny I hardly knew ya...
The new ad panels - sorry mid-page eye-grabbers - made me think I'd got the wrong site - I was just about to go hunting when I noticed there were story indications inside and not ads. I bet the designers are ad folks.
So, the ad panels - sorry eye-grabbers - shouldn't have broad grey borders, they shouldn't have the heading lighter than the text or the same size, and they need to be marked as editorial by a vulture icon.
The special report panels are way too strong - steal your attention from the news and also look like ads.
While the main news banner at the top is nowhere near eye-catching enough, having none of the pizzazz of the spec reps or ad panels - sorry, eye-grabbers. It needs an icon too if it's gonna be snazzed up a bit.
The vulture god help us looked almost cuddly. And where the hell has it disappeared to from the comment icons?? American squeamishness kicking in??
That's enough for now.
I'll be back...
(Where's the icon for a Supercilious Arrogant Full-Of-Shit Wanker - that's what I'd like to know!
Paris, cos she's wondering too - dunno what she's up to with her other hand though...)
I don't mind the new layout, because I already have a Greasemonkey script that fixes it. Took about five minutes.
Here's a hint to the Reg designers: a CSS rule that applies a value in pixels to the width attribute generally means that someone needs a good kicking. My viewport is not the same width as your viewport.
Since I like narrow text columns, my FixRegisterStyles GM script currently just appends a <style> node containing:
#main-col { width: 400px; float: left }
which is good enough for my purposes at the moment. (Note that *I* can use a width in pixels, because only I ever see this style applied, so I always control the viewport width.) As time goes on and I find myself irritated by other things, I'll slap corrections for them in as well.
. . . sums up the whole redesign project. Amateurish at best.
I've waited a few days before commenting. If I'd jumped straight in on Monday, then my post would have been deleted due to some colourful language use.
Anyway, congratulations on having the balls to unveil a site redesign without first beta testing it or even doing an accessibility audit.
"we accept that the approach we've taken creates problems for us there, but we'll be working on dealing with them"
Any problems, especially those as basic as fixed Vs fluid width should have been dealt with before going live. Actually, it should have been dealt with as part of the initial design phase where you looked at what devices your audience use to access the site, and you decided that the GUI should be multi-platform and multi-resolution friendly. . .
I've no objections to you undertaking a site redesign project, but in future, please appoint a project manager who has some proven track record in this area.
And whatever you do, don't let your young children redesign the icons again.
Your main page now hurts to read.
Font: I shouldn't have to use ctrl+ on every fucking page. If it takes too long or too many clicks to read, I will click away. Seriously, what teenaged idiot has you convinced that a crampy sans-serif font is "trendy". Fucking ow. Now I have to pick between a headache reading the itty bitty font, or aggravating my RSI by hitting ctrl+ repeatedly. Not worth the bother, IMO.
Fixed Width: What 1995 Geocities amateur stupidity! The reason for variable width is to accommodate the user's browser, window width preferences and screen resolution. Whether it's a narrow monitor or a wide-screen (with narrow or wide browser windows), variable width adapts to all users, fixed width suits only a few, and makes for unpleasantness or extra work for the rest. Both tiny screen and wide screen users are annoyed. Dump it. (Hint: my browser window has lots of tabs, but does not take up my entire screen. I'm not going to resize my browser window just for your little site. The other sites I go to are either properly variable, or are amateur and not expected to be anything but bog stupid fixed width.)
Ads: Big, ugly, noxious. 1/3 of the page for ads and useless graphics/flash? Do not want.
If you paid someone for this design, you got horribly cheated.
I was unable to read clearly your headlines and teasers, so I'll have to give your content a miss for a while. Too bad, because you usually had good stuff, but now it's too much fucking work to read. If I have to do that much work and messing about to read something, I need to be paid.
I'll stop back in a week to see if you've pulled your head out. Now, I need some headache tablets.
It's now done, it dosn't get it quite right but is good enough for me. I've made it available on the userscripts website for anybody else who wants to try it.
I'm also using the user agent switcher with the following user agent when accessing the reg :
Mozilla Firefox with Register fixed width killer
I suggest we all do the same, hopefully if enough people do this they might notice that we still like the reg but don't like the new design.
Hey, El Reg guys, you've had a week to work on some of the things that keep getting brought up over, and over, and over again: what's happening? I'm trying to be patient, assuming that you're going to fix the accessibility/readability issues - but we haven't heard anything.
Something you guys have done to the site is crashing my Firefox browser on a regular basis It's just started in the past few days. It doesn't crash IE though...
I think that a lot of the problems people have with this fixed-width register is the over use (or indeed over implementation) of the Maximise function.
I mean, in this world of multi-thousand pixel-wide screen, why would you need *one* application to take up the whole screen?
Ah you say "how about TV, surely I want that to be the whole screen"
Yes, I agree, there are *some* applications that benefit from being big an all over your screen at one go, but its not something you need *as standard* on *everything*
I've got a simple 1650 wide screen here. I'm running about 12 applications dotted around. Because of he fact that one of them has maximised I have to use that bloody annoying bar at the bottom of the screen to see what's open. I suppose I could put that bar up the *top* of the screen but that's not helping matters.
I mean, if you've got notepad open, surely you need some other application open too (even if its another notepad) so you can check what you're hacking?
One problem with maximise is its use by... lets call them "average users".
How many times have you gone over to a user's desk and seen that they have 45 outlook windows open? The "average user" forgets something as soon as its hidden from them, and with maximised windows *everything* gets hidden from them as soon as they open the Next Thing. Hell; explaining its quicker to close-things-you-go gets a bit tired after the first few times with each user...
Lets get rid of the maximise button, or make its function be a "change window to 80% of the screen" and, for those few application that have a need to be played full screen (games, pr0n) give them the option. Hold on, when playing the MMOs I always have the game in a window too so that I can surf whilst mining.. (In fact, how stupid do many older games look that should be 640x480 when scaled up to 1650x1080!) And when watching TV I've often surfed to the shows's website (or run the FIA Live Timing App) at the same time... Maybe there just is *no need*for the maximise button at all!
Hold on, I've a better idea. Lets just include a force-feedback option on the maximise button, when you click it an electric shock is fed back into your mouse; that'll stop people using it!
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