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Saturday, 29 November 2008

Upgrades in Progress

We are currently working on a new layout for our blog so apologies if things seem in a bit of a disarray.

You may notice in your feeds that we have posted new posts but they are dated for ages ago. This is so we can make use of our new links bar, there is unfortunately no way to avoid them coming up on the feeds.

We have been working on this all day, Madeleine created the header image and that took a while as the original had blue sky and scaffolding on it, so we will take a break now and keep fiddling over the weekend.

Please let us know what you think of the new layout and look. We have not yet had a chance to test the colours on other computers and we are aware that while out old layout looked like a pale cream on our computer on others it was a fairly loud orange brown - hence the change.

These colours should all be complementary to the header image and the links and text should all stand out - please let us know if it does not.

7 comments:

  1. Test comment to check the recent comments widget is working.

    ReplyDelete
  2. No it isn't, can't see any recent comments.

    Nice layout. Kind of 70s look. May date, but then you can just change the template again.

    The side bars have brown (slightly red) background with yellow/ brown unvisited links and yellow visited links, so the visited links stand out and the unvisited ones are difficult to read. I tend to think it should be the other way around, visited links do not need to be prominent as you've already seen them.

    Moreover, mouseover turns unvisited links red and makes them even harder to read (and mouseover on the main column turns links from red to yellow on yellow). I guess one has read the link prior to mouseover though.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks that is really helpful. On our computer the colours are very distinct and nothing is hard to see colour-wise - the trick though is getting them all like that on everyone's computer.

    At the moment we cannot access another computer to look at them with so we will rely on comments.

    I will reverse the links phases on the side bars and address the mouseover colours - thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hey guys, it looks really good so far. Just one criticism: at the bottom of the header, those keywords look like they are clickable categories, but they aren't...

    ReplyDelete
  5. I thought I had taken that down - thanks our cache must have been lazy.

    I tried that so we had a description of what our blog was about near the tip but we thought it was too busy as it was next to the link bar, and of course, as you pointed out, it looked clickable.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Bethyada I have tried to counter the 70's look with some changes to colour - do you think its any better?

    The biggest problem is that border - I could make everything except the main boxes the same colour but I am not sure what else to do if I am to use tones in the header image which I really like.

    ReplyDelete
  7. My apologies Madeleine, I didn't mean gaudily 70s, more classical 70s.

    It is similar because I didn't think it was the border alone, more the colour scheme. But I still think classy.

    Comments are now showing.

    I like the twin columns on the right, I have thought I would like to split of post related items (labels and history) from other links just as you have done.

    I am not certain what makes an appealing blog. I would say that your hits are related to the written material given the nature of your blog. The rest to a degree is fluff.

    I have thought that blogs may be more appealing if there is the odd thematic picture, but because of the time involved I haven't stated doing this.

    ReplyDelete

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