Sneak preview of new site design

[Oliver]

Hi team,

I've been working on a new look for our site and want to run it past all of you before I release it on the general public.

You can view it at http://www.homebrewandbeer.com/test/default.htm
[NOTE: This link is no longer active as the new-look site is live at http://www.homebrewandbeer.com/ ]

As well as being a new look, we've added a site search function and improved the navigation, adding more things to the menu on the left rather than having them as links from other pages. It should also load much faster than the previous design (old design: http://www.homebrewandbeer.com/ ).

There's still a bit of tweaking to do, but it's pretty much as it will be.

Bear in mind that some links won't work just yet (such as the links to this forum and some of the downloads in the Bits and Pieces section).

Please let me know what you think.

Cheers,


Oliver

[grabman]

Oliver,

Just a had a look at the new site, very clean!!!! It looks great, you're right it does load faster.

Top effort. What are you using to write the html for the site?

Simon

[Evo]

Yeah, not a bad look at all. Do you want a web design job here ? You're a better desiger than half the monkeys that work for me (musn't say that).

Hats off !

[Dogger Dan]

Very Nice,

When do we take it out for a drive?

Dogger

[Oliver]

Hi guys,

Thanks for the feedback.

I'll send it live in the next couple of days.

I'm Um'ing and Aaah'ing about the colour of the banner and a few other things. When I've made up my mind I'll release it on the world.

Simon, the coding of the content is pretty much the same as it was, but with different navigation and banner. But it now uses cascading style sheets to do the layout rather than frames and tables. I wrote all the coding in Notepad. If you're interested you can read more by going to the about/HOMEBREWANDBEER section on the new site ( http://www.homebrewandbeer.com/test/hbab.html ).

The hardest thing about the new design was making it look as I wanted in Internet Explorer, which has several nasty bugs which mean that a design that looks fine in Firefox, Opera or Netscape was all over the shop in IE on PC. If any of you have one of these other browsers installed, have a look at the spacing of the items in the navigation bar compared with how IE does it.

And if you haven't tried Mozilla Firefox, do yourself a favor!

Enough for now

Oliver

[Pyssedas Heavy Industrial]

very nice - not that i dislike the previous version

[Oliver]

Part of the problem with the old site was that it used frames. This mean that that if a search engine directs you to a page you just get that page and not the navigation bar. Very confusing. There are ways around that problem using Javascript, but I wanted to redesign anyway so thought I'd kill two birds with one stone

Cheers,

Oliver

[Robinelle]

Lay out and new heading text/font looks professional. Two improvements:

The body text font style (same as old page?) does not suite the new look.

The Glass looks stretched and unnatural. It would look beter with a correctly proportioned glass.

Regards
Rob

[Oliver]

Hi Rob,

Thanks for the comments. The glass was, indeed, stretched. I stuffed it up.

In any case, I had one of the imaging blokes at work do some adjustments on it, and it looks heaps better now.

As for the body text, you may be right about that. I'll have a play.

Cheers,

Oliver

[Oliver]

Hi guys,

The new design is now live at http://www.homebrewandbeer.com

Please post any comments, queries or suggestions for changes here.

Cheers,

Oliver

[Dogger Dan]

Awesome, Very Awesome

Dogger

[Andy]

Looks good, very good.

[BPJ]

Oliver
looks good.

I use XP with IE6 at 1024 x 728 resolution. this leaves about 2 inches blank at each side.

Perhaps in the links you could set up a directory of Home Brew Shops.

[Oliver]

BPJ,

The fixed-width design was actually intentional as it makes it much easier for me as the designer! Because everyone views it the same, I don't have to test in lots of resolutions, just design on 800x600 monitor.

Also, check out Mozilla Firefox. The site looks a bit different in that. I hate IE. So many bugs that make designing web pages for it a pain, not to mention security flaws. Opera and Netscape also display the site pretty much as intended.

Enough ranting for now.

Cheers,

Oliver

[Evo]

Yeah Oliver, with you on the IE thing. The only problem is with the majority of web users using it, you have to work around it. Kill Bill and all our problems would be solved.