New Look For Front page

Don't get used to it as I'm making room for other stuff.

Having said that the only thing that has changed is the descriptions no longer appear under the sub forums, the text is a little smaller and the last post for them no longer appears. the last post that does appear will be overall for every forum in that category. Click the main category link and its a standard view you were used too albeit without all the the other categories.

Sorry if it's causing any confusion but I need room.

Richard, any chance you can move the advertising box to the bottom of the page? It takes up so much valuable space at the top, and forces me to do an immediate Page-down.

I'll be working on making the header smaller soon.

Changes before coffee has fully kicked in for me lead to confusion.
I did not have to scroll down to see the headings.
Ads do get the prime spot!

Richard, Excuse my rudimentery CUT & PASTE Attempts.... I threw together a thought of mine that I have had for awhile. The format of the Front page, with your latest changes. I essentially reduced the size of the Non-Data blocks to allow more room for the "Good Stuff"
Here is my version....

Isn't advertising SUPPOSED to be in the most prominent page position

I mean -- who is really footing the bills here?

No offense but the front page is very old school and the small text is hard to read. I understand that you're trying to condense the page but it isn't a big deal to scroll down. I'd loose the drab grey and make it more graphical. Here a good forum with millions of users: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/index.html?sid=1

This one is more simple: http://www.helpfulgardener.com/phpBB2/

http://www.thegrowspot.com/

I vote for what you got. Simple and to the point.

TSB

traderfjp wrote: I'd loose the drab grey and make it more graphical.

The more graphics there are, the longer the pages take to load. I like the way the pages are now. They load fast and you don't get distracted by clutter thats not needed. I do agree that some of the text is kind of hard to see on the index page, but there's not much reading to be done on that page anyway.

Jeff

traderfjp wrote:No offense but the front page is very old school and the small text is hard to read.

Well as it's a listing it's primary function is to list things so choices are limited in what you can do with it. Having said that I'll be adding some graphics to spruce it up a bit. I was looking at the text myself and increasing the size is on the to do list.

ceccil wrote:The more graphics there are, the longer the pages take to load

Only initially, images are cached locally. There's a variety of reasons this site is so fast. One of them being it doesn't use tables for layouts which can considerably slow down the render time on pages if it's a big table. For example the subforum listings here look like this:

Code: Select all

dd class="subforums">
<a href="http://nepacrossroads.com/forum-57.html" class="subforum unread" title="New posts">Anthracite Coal Discussion and News</a>
<a href="http://nepacrossroads.com/forum-71.html" class="subforum unread" title="New posts">The Best of Anthracite Coal Forum Topics</a>
<a href="http://nepacrossroads.com/forum-91.html" class="subforum read" title="No new posts">Coalcast Broadcasts with Patrick and Paul</a>
<a href="http://nepacrossroads.com/forum-58.html" class="subforum unread" title="New posts">Coal Stokers: Boilers, Furnaces and Stoves</a>
<a href="http://nepacrossroads.com/forum-55.html" class="subforum unread" title="New posts">Hand Fired Coal Stoves</a>
<a href="http://nepacrossroads.com/forum-67.html" class="subforum unread" title="New posts">Venting, Plumbing, Chimneys, Controls, Coal Bins</a>
<a href="http://nepacrossroads.com/forum-68.html" class="subforum unread" title="New posts">Using Bituminous Coal</a>
<a href="http://nepacrossroads.com/forum-54.html" class="subforum unread" title="New posts">Anthracite Coal Region History</a>
<a href="http://nepacrossroads.com/forum-70.html" class="subforum unread" title="New posts">Wood, Gas, Oil, Geothermal and Other Heating Units</a>                    
</dd>
 

A typical table layout might look like this:

Code: Select all

<table>
 <tr>
  <td><a href="http://nepacrossroads.com/forum-57.html" class="subforum unread" title="New posts">Anthracite Coal Discussion and News</a></td>
  <td><a href="http://nepacrossroads.com/forum-57.html" class="subforum unread" title="New posts">Anthracite Coal Discussion and News</a></td>
  <td><a href="http://nepacrossroads.com/forum-57.html" class="subforum unread" title="New posts">Anthracite Coal Discussion and News</a></td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
  <td><a href="http://nepacrossroads.com/forum-57.html" class="subforum unread" title="New posts">Anthracite Coal Discussion and News</a></td>
  <td><a href="http://nepacrossroads.com/forum-57.html" class="subforum unread" title="New posts">Anthracite Coal Discussion and News</a></td>
  <td><a href="http://nepacrossroads.com/forum-57.html" class="subforum unread" title="New posts">Anthracite Coal Discussion and News</a></td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
  <td><a href="http://nepacrossroads.com/forum-57.html" class="subforum unread" title="New posts">Anthracite Coal Discussion and News</a></td>
  <td><a href="http://nepacrossroads.com/forum-57.html" class="subforum unread" title="New posts">Anthracite Coal Discussion and News</a></td>
  <td><a href="http://nepacrossroads.com/forum-57.html" class="subforum unread" title="New posts">Anthracite Coal Discussion and News</a></td>
 </tr>
</table>
 

Instead of the browser having to calculate the position and size of one box per link it needs to calculate many. All in the details. That's just one reason, there are others.

All of that is Latin to me. I do remember years ago, a friend and myself copied a program for a game out of a magazine for a Commador 64. Took us ten hrs. of nonstop typing to finish. The bad part is that the game was pretty boring after all of that typing.

Jeff

I'm not too picky about looks -- as long as it works. That philosophy transfers to cars also!



Computers have come a long way since the "Oregon Trail" days! That was my intro to computers in school: Go to line 10 -- go to line 20 . Simpler times....

It's no that hard to decipher, it's HTML markup. Matter of fact it's quite similar to the bbcode here. Think of it as series of different size boxes. You have generic boxes that can contain anything including other boxes and you have boxes for specific content. You assing attribute to the boxes such as color, background, font size etc.

The reason the tables take so much longer to render is because it has a lot of boxes.

It might be interesting to do a poll to see who has broadband. I can load the most graphically intense pages in under 2 seconds. If there are only a few users with slow connections then you could offer a text version to go along with a graphical front page.

Images will be minimal and again you only have to load them once every few weeks, when you download a file it's cached locally on your computer e.g "Temporary Internet Files". The initial page load for "Pictures of your stove" will be pretty big:



These files are given an expiration date for the local cache and your browser will automatically download them again when they expire. Since the content of the page itself can change rapidly on a forum it's set with no cache so it will always download a new version. If we go up to the address bar and hit return the page load has been reduced to 12kb which is blink of the eye even for 56k dial up.



If you hit refresh the browser will make a request for the file, if they are not modified since they were downloaded the server sends back a response of not modified and they are still pulled from the cache:



To truly refresh you need to either delete them from the temporary internet files or on most browsers you can hit ctrl f5 which will do real refresh and force a reload of all the files.