The new photo.net "look"

Hey, Brian, Bob, elves, I was right in the middle of browsing the

forums when the new "look" took effect.

 

First impression, looks damned good. The graduated blue banner is

attractive. I may have to adjust my default settings for font colors

but that's okay.

I was like "oh dammit it's lagged again!", but then realized :) Looks nice, and hopefully will be a bit faster.

 

Simone

It looks good but I'd prefer underlined links.

Same with me. I first thought that the lack of underlined links meant that my Mozilla had a display problem. Only then did I notice the new look. Please take that out of the style sheet again!

I like the new colors! But I would prefer the underlined links too, as I found them easier to read.

It looks terrible. A strain on the eyes.

One more vote for underlined links.

It's time for the elves to read Philip Greenspun's original charter - don't mess with the user interface: <a href="http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/html.html">Chapter 3: Learn to Program HTML in 21 Minutes</a> (http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/html.html).

I hope that there is a lot going on in the background. More than the visable change we see here.

 

I have no idea why removing underlines from links is so popular. Next, we'll probably see black links with black text.

 

Add my vote into the "bring back the underlines" bucket.

Gordon, I don't agree with Philip on the subject of link style. I might have agreed with him several years ago when his chapter was written, but I don't now.

 

The original convention of browsers was to underline links, to show unvisited links in one color, and visited links in another. All this, especially the underlines, made pages with many links ugly, noisy, and not very readable. At the time Philip wrote his chapter, it was possible with later browsers for designers to alter the style of links, and people were starting to do it. Philip stated his opposition to this practice, because it was inconsistent with the de facto user interface, and would confuse users. He had a point.

 

However, in the subsequent years, the practice of altering default link style has continued, despite the advantages of a consistent style -- to the point where I don't believe that there is now any de facto standard, especially on professional sites. Some sites remove the underlines; others don't; some maintain the visited versus unvisited color conventions, while changing the colors; others dispense with the color convention entirely. On many pages, a lot of the links are images, even though they sometimes look like text, and they are neither underlined nor colored. There is no longer any standard style for links, in my opinion.

 

I don't know if this makes life harder for users. (I doubt it, and I personally don't ever have any trouble figuring out what is a link on a Web Page.)

 

I am glad, especially, that the idiotic underline convention has been weakened because it means that we no longer have to underline links just to be "consistent". On many photo.net pages, like forum topic lists, everything is a link, and the underlines were completely unnecessary. Practically everything was underlined, which was incredibly ugly and noisy, and rendered the page difficult to read.

 

Good riddance to the underlines.

I miss the animated photo.net logo. It used to always load in advance of the page displaying fully, now it's a static logo.

 

I hope, but understand the reasons why it might be necessary, this isn't the first step towards banners on every page, or if this is that step, I hope they are disabled for photo.net patrons.

I also agree with underlining links.

The advantage of underlined links is that they are still visible on monochrome display (though I doubt there are many of those left!), or when using text only browsers such as Lynx (but then again how many Lynx users are there?). It can also make links clearer when visited links are presented in dark blue (such as they are here) and text is in black. You do have to look twice to see a link sometimes, especially if it's a single word in the middle of a line of text.

 

The disadvantage of undelined links is that if there are a lot of them they can really clutter up the page (e.g. the forums).

 

It's a matter of personal preference I guess.

 

In Netscape 4.8 it's trivial to select the option that underlines links (edit - preferences - appearance - colors) and that overrides anything that photo.net does, so you can easily have underlined links if you want them. I presume there's something burried in IE 6.0 that does the same thing, though I've no idea where they hide it.

The redesign was done in order to allow for a banner on every page.

At present, about 30% of page impressions will have a banner ad.

 

A few sites that I know of turn ads off for their subscribers. We have discussed this idea, but we probably won't do it -- for two reasons.

 

First, we will take care to reject ads that are annoying or distracting.

 

Second, we hope that the package of benefits and the desire to support the site are sufficient to motivate people to subscribe. We'd like to encourage people to subscribe. If we turn off the ads for subscribers, it might seem like we are giving people a choice. Either become a subscriber or let us annoy you with ads. Since we are striving to make the ads quite tolerable, if we turned off ads for subscribers, people might reason that since the ads are acceptable, they don't need to support the site by subscribing. To keep a site like this running we need both advertising revenue AND subscriptions, since ad revenue doesn't amount to much. It isn't really an either/or.

I don't feel the banner ads are distracting at all. It's not like on some sites where banner ad invade the content at regular intervals. If they are all confined to the page header they are pretty benign. Of course the downside to this is that they are easy to ignore, which isn't always the first goal of advertising, but seems like a good compromise for photo.net!

i agree-it looks like crap. and having the links not be underlined

makes it more difficult to quickly spot links on the page when

your eye scans it. plus, when printing a page out, you can no

longer tell what are links and what are not.

I liked the search box on top of the homepage or was it every page...

A search box at the top right hand I liked.

<em>I am glad, especially, that the idiotic underline convention has been weakened because it means that we no longer have to underline links just to be "consistent". On many photo.net pages, like forum topic lists, everything is a link, and the underlines were completely unnecessary. Practically everything was underlined, which was incredibly ugly and noisy, and rendered the page difficult to read.</em>

<p>

1) I believe your history on the topic of links is completely wrong. Links are underlined because "browsing" was originally done on monocromatic displays.

<p>

2) Good site design is about providing functionality as well as content. Link styles come into direct conflict with this functionality when the idea of font color is applied to a web page and/or site. There should be no doubt in anyones mind what is and what is not a link on a site for it to be truly functional. It's just basic design. Just because removing the underline from links has become "popular" (my word) with "professional sites" (your words) does not make it right. Most "professional sites" fall flat on their faces when it comes to providing a consistant and useable interface to _all_ users.

<p>

If you use Geocities as your data set, web design should involve as many plugins as possible, as many colors as possible, and as many CSS tricks as you can fit into a page. Hover links should increase font size by 10 points and there should be at least 3 animated gifs per page. So clearly, going off of what "other sites" do is a silly practice. (Yes, there are faults with this choice of examples, it's for illustration purposes only)

<p>

There should be no doubt in any users mind what is and is not a link. There should be no doubt as to where one is on the site, and there should be no doubt where they can go next. Consistant, useable design should be something photo.net and every site strives for.

Regarding underlining links - I really do prefer the thread links on the "Forum" pages to be underlined as it makes it easier to follow a thread from title to author to forum. For the other links, I really don't care, but when I go to the Unified Forum, the individual threads are separated only by their colors and the little bullet at the beginning. With the underlines, it was much easier to distinguish and read a thread's info quickly, from right to left.

<p>

And for ads, I don't mind banners too much. I do understand that revenue comes in from ads AND subscriptions, but why should someone who paid to be a patron have to see an ad describing what the patron icon means and how to get one? I see the site sort of like shareware where you get a demo version of a program that pays the programmer via ads. If the user pays the programmer for the software, the ads go away. But, again, I do know that photo.net needs the extra $$$, so it's not a big deal to me. HOWEVER, if I <i>ever</i> get a popup ad, I'm gone! :)

<p>

Just my 2 Alaskan cents...

<p>Is it just me who finds it really difficult to distinguish which topics in the forums are read and which are unread? The shades of blue are <i>really</i> similar on my TFT screen.<p>

 

(Also, another vote for bringing back the underlining... or having user-selectable css interfaces)

My major gripe is not so much with the removal of the underlined links, but with the complete lack of feedback when I mouse over a link. Before the "update" links would be highlighted when I moused over them. Now the only way to be sure that I've hit the link is watching out for the cursor to change its appearance. My eyesight isn't that bad, but my monitor resolution is 1280x1024, and the cursor is much smaller than the link.

<p>

So, if the elves insist on removing the underlined links, please give us back the visual feedback by changing link colors when I hover over a link!

The banners i'm seeing at the moment dont bother me one bit, they're not animated or intrusive. Pop-ups and flash-banners would be a problem however. As a subscriber, I find it kind of odd to get banners asking me to subscribe though.

Frank,

<p>

I asked something similar a while ago (<a href="http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=003dpB"> http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=003dpB</a> ) and it wasn't taken very well. I think there was a general mis-understanding of my question, but maybe the admins are more open to the idea now.

It's hard to argue with banner ads if they help pay the bills, but the removal of the underlining from the links is a terrible mistake, in my opinion, with no compelling rationale. It may look better, but it doesn't "use" better. To me, anyway.