Revamping Play Online - Want Some Opinions

[mollipen]

I'd take a step back. Let it fester for a day and then go back. I don't know if you're sitting in front of the monitor 8 hours a day looking at this and working on it. If you are, take a break. I'm sure you are on the right path. You are just over analyzing it.

Yeah, I'm going to go back to working on coding stuff for a bit, and then come back to the layout stuff. I stupidly let myself get to this point far too often: just kind of stuck trying to decide which ideas to go with, instead of just picking on and going with it.

I'd put a link to d/l Firefox.

Thankfully our traffic is only 15% IE6, so while I'm going to try to make a site that can degrade in IE6 without looking bad, but at the same time try to push IE6 users into using something else by showing them what they're missing.

But serious, you should see if you can d/l the old IE6 and check it out yourself.

Yeah, I'm going to hopefully get WinXP installed on my new iMac here soon. I'd really like to be running IE7 for testing, but unless I can get the dual-IE set-up going, I'll stick with IE6 for now just to make sure things at least work in that version.

[Dyne]

i'm not quite sure how Virtual Macine stuff works completely but couldnt you install XP (which has IE6 on it natively) then run a Virtual Machine version that has IE 7 installed?

[mollipen]

Okay, so I've been spending most of my time working on the coding stuff (going from PHP 4 to PHP 5 wasn't the hassle I was expecting it to be), so I haven't put much time into working on layout stuff.

Still, just playing around, threw this together quickly - has a little bit more of a feel of being a magazine page versus a webpage. Direction wise, what do you guys think of this compared to the stuff I previously posted?

[Advocate]

You're going to hate me ... I liked the first one.

If its a custom background I like the one you just did, but I love black. Any shade of white or any light colors from a monitor hurt my eyes.

But I liked the first one you posted and just refine that. Add what Bbobb suggested that hoverover color and you'll be golden.

[Nick]

I hate the idea of having to scroll down a full window height to get to the first word of the article.

[mollipen]

See, part of me has been getting worried about the white text on black, so that's why I was trying something different. (Plus, the white back looks more like a magazine.) But I still really like the black, especially with how sexy black looks on this glossy iMac screen.

Just a very quick change. Like I said, though, I'm still far from finishing the layout, so right now I'm just trying things to see how the idea works.

I hate the idea of having to scroll down a full window height to get to the first word of the article.

Yeah, this fact isn't lost on me. That's why most of the ideas I posted in the first post had header images that were far smaller. This later test is to play around with the idea some were saying of making it less website-like and more magazine-like.

[Advocate]

What size monitor do you have? 17?

[Nick]

I'm going off that 300 x 300 ad box. If that's 300 pixels high, then I estimate it's about 800 pixels from the top of the page to the content. My monitor is 1920 x 1200 at home, but a lot of people are still using 1024 x 768 at work and at home and there are toolbars to take into account.

[mollipen]

With the first ones posted, my goal was that within the first 768 pixels you had to at least see the following things: content title, who wrote it, tab bar, and the start of the content.

Obviously, that isn't quite the case with this latest idea (at this point).

[Nick]

So when you are looking at a typical screen with title bar, navigation bar, third-party toolbar, status bar, task bar - when the user loads the page, all he gets is a big picture and the static elements of the site (logo, banner ad, etc.)? Seems like that particular design has the art director in mind more than the end-user.