October 9, 2000

5:46 PM

Change of scenery.Weblogs.com has had a serious overhaul. What does this group of rag-tag critics think?
posted by Neale (17 comments total)

I don't know about anyone else, but I can barely make out the difference in the colors between visited & non-visited links. Otherwise, it looks ok to me.. it is nice to have a bit of color there after the stark whiteness of the last design.
posted by zempf at 6:24 PM on October 9, 2000

Um, it looks the same to me-all grey and white and stuff, with regular old purple and blue link colors.
posted by Electric Elf at 6:53 PM on October 9, 2000

they took down the new design after I wrote dave and let him know that it locked up my machine looking at it in NN. even in IE it is terribly slow to render.

the first time I looked at it they had a big "sign up to geta weblog at weblogs.com" form at the top which made the reason you go there--updated weblogs--move to nearly a screen down. last I looked they had removed that.

I like the design overall (with the signup sheet moved elsewhere) but I do find it hard to read that list of weblogs in that teeny weeny type--and I can't tell which have been visited and which haven't, either.

so (even apart from the rendering problems) I think the design could use a few more iterations. but overall, I like it.

rcb
posted by rebeccablood at 7:12 PM on October 9, 2000

Here is a screenshot.
...
michael
posted by chymes at 7:24 PM on October 9, 2000

I like that. I hope they get it working soon.
posted by Zeldman at 9:25 PM on October 9, 2000

I too hope it's back up soon. Anything is better than their current drab design. It's always seemed to rub me the wrong way.
posted by tomorama at 9:53 PM on October 9, 2000

The "drop shadow" is a great touch. Looks great, Dave!
posted by EricBrooksDotCom at 5:45 AM on October 10, 2000

I think it's a bit nicer with the boxes on the left removed. It was much too busy before. But on the whole I think it's fairly handsome.

I agree the visited/not colors need to have more contrast.
posted by dhartung at 7:21 AM on October 10, 2000

Upon futher inspection, I have to add a "me too" to the list of people that want more contrast to the "v-links". The new look is great, but it kinda loses some of the site's "usability" (am I allowed to use that word here?), as I have to strain to check up on old friends once they update.
posted by EricBrooksDotCom at 8:31 AM on October 10, 2000

The drop shadows fall every which way.
posted by ericost at 8:39 AM on October 10, 2000

I counted 5 levels of table nesting. I figure 3 is about as far as you'd ever want to go. Beyond that, Netscape does a lot of thinking before it lays anything out.
posted by dithered at 8:54 AM on October 10, 2000

The links certainly need sorting out, the visited hyperlinks are barely distinguishable from the unvisited ones.

Aside from that issue, it's a nice fresh look.
posted by williamtry at 11:15 AM on October 10, 2000

yay! they just changed the color of the unvisited links!

(thanks for reading and listening, userland staff!)

now, if only they would get rid of that insane table-nesting (is this a frontier thing? it would be easy to do the same design without all those tables within tables), the site would be beautiful, useful, and quick to load!

rcb
posted by rebeccablood at 11:39 AM on October 10, 2000

no, wait--they just changed back.

I prefer them to be a very distinct color from each other: you have a gray background and blue/gray links, and a long, long list of them.

rcb
posted by rebeccablood at 11:55 AM on October 10, 2000

I've found that 5 layers for NN 4.x are usually rendered in a reasonable time frame. Well, the difference between 4 and 5 isn't terrible. Add a 6th layer of nesting, and be prepared to brew coffee. For an army.

Although I do agree that in most situations, nesting > 3 tables should be unnecessary, I'm sure someone could argue in favour of 5.
posted by cCranium at 1:14 PM on October 10, 2000

It appears that they're prototyping in place all day today ... which is a Frontier thing (or at least a Manila thing). In dealing with my editthispage.com site I've often wished for a "scratch space" only visible to me. If I ran my own Frontier server, perhaps ...
posted by dhartung at 2:59 PM on October 10, 2000

My favorite part of the redesign? The replacement of the inexplicable tagline "Way down south in the land of cotton." Er, color me "huh?".
posted by bradlands at 10:43 PM on October 11, 2000