Do you like the current DaniWeb design/layout?

[Dani]

I have gotten soooo many mixed opinions lately, and I was wondering what you guys thought of the current style. Please be brutally honest. I'm not talking about "It's missing a link in a convenient place" or little functional things that can easily be changed/added/removed. I'm talking about the color scheme, the main navigation, the aesthetics, if it's pleasing to the eye to look at for a long time, etc.

[beeerlover]

First off, kudos for asking for input. The world would be a better place if everyone did.

I think the Navigation and Layout are as good as any others I have seen on other sites.

I have done some user selectable theming on another forum, and after letting the community chose the most popular test themes to go live, 2 years later we notice only a small percentage of users using anything other than the default. LOL a lot of work for very little payoff.

At this point in internet evolution, where most sites have made the www2 jump years ago, and many sites have made the www3 jump already, I would recommend to anyone considering theming to skip the idea of just moving web elements around and changing some colors and devote the time to produce a www3 theme that basically allows the member to design their own theme/layout easily.

As far as aesthetics, I am a fan of dark themes, so the current white and light grays isn't my favorite :P

[William Hemsworth]

I think it's fine and very easy to navigate. I also just saw that you made threads with 0 posts red, that will make life ever so slightly easier for me :)

I am a fan of dark themes

The yellow orange and purple isn't quite my favourite either, but it doesn't really annoy me in any way.

[William Hemsworth]

What's with the one grey block? :'(

[jasimp]

Sorry to be a dark cloud in all this but...

The new voting thing is terrible. As others have said it adds so much clutter to the design, its more information than anyone needs to know, its confusing for people who aren't regulars.

Why did you implement it in the first place? Was traffic lagging? Did members express interest in the idea?

It needs to go.

Also, I too noticed everyone has a gray block for rep now.

[jbennet]

Did members express interest in the idea?

Yes, its a helpful feature for people like AD who want to comment on a posts worthiness without instantly sending a member into the red in terms of rep points.

Its virtually identical to the (previous) system of rating threads by a star system.

p.s.

One thing, can we please give the button with the little man on a text label.

And i LOVE the new profile page with the statistics.

Also, a bar along the bottom with IM chat and notifications (e.g of replies to subscribed threads) like on facebook would be AWESOME.

P.S a way to see only the reported posts which were a) unsolved and b) in forums I moderate would be a great addition for staff. Its hard to go through the reported posts board and manually pick out the ones that need attention.

[William Hemsworth]

Things are pretty crazy with reputation at the moment, just in case you haven't yet noticed this.

[Dani]

Reputation is straightened out. Sorry about that everyone!

> Did members express interest in the idea?
Yes, a good number of members were looking for an easy way to vote a post up or down without it affecting the user's reputation. I took that idea and combined it with a Digg-esque feel.

[jasimp]

Yes, its a helpful feature for people like AD who want to comment on a posts worthiness without instantly sending a member into the red in terms of rep points.

What stops them from making a "comment on a posts worthiness" in the thread itself?

Its virtually identical to the (previous) system of rating threads by a star system.

No it isn't. It's integrated into the rep system, and it takes up twice as much screen space.

[jasimp]

Yes, a good number of members were looking for an easy way to vote a post up or down without it affecting the user's reputation. I took that idea and combined it with a Digg-esque feel.

So was there more than one thread on it besides the one AD started? On that thread I counted about 6 people who liked it.

[Dani]

It's been a very long running debate in behind the scenes forums for a very long time.

[John A]

You probably already know what my opinion is going to be, but here it is one final time.

The old flat 2006 DaniWeb looked way nicer.

http://www.daniweb.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=3311&d=1177976833

It was designed much more around actual functionality; it didn't have these silly "share this", "syndicate that", tags, votes, even reputation kind of took a back seat. Everything was much more focused around what I came to see in the first place: the posts.

Now, when I view DaniWeb I see a confusing array of features which, although have (some) relevance to the whole forum aspect, are hindering my ability to read and write content here. And if I find it confusing, I can only imagine how newbies must feel.

[Dani]

Aww, that was a nice design, brings back memories for me :) I always HATE the current design, and then I come up with something new and I love it for awhile. And then I always tend to like the old one better, even though back then I hated it and loved the new one.

[John A]

Another link:
http://web.archive.org/web/20061009204308/www.daniweb.com/techtalkforums/

I liked the convenience of jumping right to a subforum by checking the color of the miniature arrow. But then you took out the subforums:
http://web.archive.org/web/20060202033038/www.daniweb.com/techtalkforums/

[jephthah]

i think your changes are inspired by a lot of good ideas :)

but like some other i also think it has added the perception of too much clutter.

i think the most grievous offender is the row of "share this" "send that" "bookmark" "yadda yadda" buttons... I think they're ugly and extremely distracting/annoying. i would get rid of all that, because i never use any of that stuff. i think it would go a long way to cleaning up the clutter.

also, the arrow design for the up/down voting... the voting concept is cool, and i think will improve the site, but the arrow buttons are just ugly and stick out like a sore thumb. perhaps something more discrete, like small unobtrusive thumbs-up thumbs-down icons ... and also perhaps making the numeric for the up/down vote count a bit less prominent.

finally, I'm not happy that my rep power went to only +5. Maybe i would like it better if i could understand how the new rep-altering formula is calculated.

that's my $0.02

[Ancient Dragon]

>>I'm not happy that my rep power went to only +5.
Ohhh. I see mine went from 60 to 24, and negative from -30 to -12. I'm happy about the negative rep because afterall that's what I asked for in the other thread I started here. I can live with 24 positive rep too because I thought 60 was a bit excessive too.

>>i think the most grievous offender is the row of "share this" "send that" "bookmark" "yadda yadda" buttons.
Agree. I don't know what those buttons do and don't want to press one so that I can find out. I'm on twitter, but I don't know what the twitter button will do.
[edit]Oh! Well I just clicked it and found out what it does. Not sure how useful it is except in places such as blogs.[/edit]

[Nick Evan]

>>i think the most grievous offender is the row of "share this" "send that" "bookmark" "yadda yadda" buttons.
Agree. I don't know what those buttons do and don't want to press one so that I can find out.

I disagree with you two. The buttons are quite essential to get the newsstories (blogs) shown on slashdot and digg. I'm a frequent visitor/user of both sites and these buttons help me submitting (or digging) articles :) So they can stay!

[jasimp]

Why was rep power changed?

[William Hemsworth]

My guess would be because of this problem. [link]

[happygeek]

The 'share' buttons are useful for forum posts beyond just news and tutorials, for the following very good reason: they can help get good threads in front of more people, beyond those who are already visitors here.

That's not only a good thing, but an essential thing. The more people that are exposed to high quality DaniWeb content, the more people will visit us and the more members we will end up with - which means it is more likely that the DaniWeb you know and love will still be here, in the same free to use format, in five or ten years time.

If you don't want to share content, that's also fine - but the buttons are hardly that intrusive in the overall scheme of things, so just ignore them if they are not your thing :)

[samir_ibrahim]

I like the current design although i am not an old user, I begin using Daniweb as my programming forum since 1 years only, since I was vfp programmer.

The design is good to the eyes (my eyes at least) and the navigation is simple.

I liked the new rating system. I guess it will take it is effect and it will show up the important of it when there is a discussion and 2 people expressing there ideas about one subject, they can see which opinion is getting more approval.

I just had one problem with the current design.
I am not able to see the Hybird style of the sheet, where I was using it to post an answer to specific user. I am not saying that you should return it back, but what is the good way to post to specific person after -let say 2 days- where there is many posts already there. Quote his entire post in my response?

[sknake]

I'm liking the new profile page :) I really like the new statistics that you are including. If you made every stat clickable that would be nice but just another feature request. For example on the "Community" tab page you have "Total Posts: N", then you could click on the "Statistics" tab and click "Find all posts by ____" to locate those N posts. With the upgrade you also hid the users "Favorite Forum" list because of "privacy issues" but that feature is basically back by seeing which forums they regularly post in.

As far as the rest of the sight i'm glad to see all of the bold 0's on the forum indexes for unvoted posts.
I am also glad to see the christmas tree colors gone on the vote up/down -- and their new position so it isn't easily confused with rep.

At this point I think i'm out of points to complain about :P
Good job Dani!

[cwarn23]

I have gotten soooo many mixed opinions lately, and I was wondering what you guys thought of the current style. Please be brutally honest. I'm not talking about "It's missing a link in a convenient place" or little functional things that can easily be changed/added/removed. I'm talking about the color scheme, the main navigation, the aesthetics, if it's pleasing to the eye to look at for a long time, etc.

My opinion on the colors and style is that the colors are perfect but the design is not. The only changes I would make is have the corners not as rounded in some places but still rounded and less padding. Also in the reply/pm post field, I would make the width 100% of the space so that it is a variable width using percentage instead of a fixed width. Other than that daniweb is perfect in my opinion.

[~s.o.s~]

I have gotten soooo many mixed opinions lately, and I was wondering what you guys thought of the current style. Please be brutally honest. [snip...]

Apart from the top portion of each post which houses the timestamp along with the vote-up links everything looks pretty decent. I still miss the plain old code tags which didn't force the numbering on you.

i think the most grievous offender is the row of "share this" "send that" "bookmark" "yadda yadda" buttons... I think they're ugly and extremely distracting/annoying. i would get rid of all that, because i never use any of that stuff. i think it would go a long way to cleaning up the clutter.

If you are using Firefox, try the NoScript extension to block the 'addthis' domain and your problem should go away.

[Dani]

> If you are using Firefox, try the NoScript extension to block the 'addthis' domain and your problem should go away.

jephthah, even though you don't use them, we do track how many people do, and a lot of people do use them. So we need to cater to the masses :) Plus they are good traffic boosters.

sos, do you think that blocking addthis with an adblocker would work?

[~s.o.s~]

> sos, do you think that blocking addthis with an adblocker would work?

Yes, it does work. Plus, NoScript isn't exactly an adblocker. See attached.

[Dani]

No, I mean for people who don't want to install another FF plugin (b/c low resources for so many plugins, etc) but who already have an adblocker installed.

[~s.o.s~]

> No, I mean for people who don't want to install another FF plugin (b/c
> low resources for so many plugins, etc) but who already have an
> adblocker installed.

Yes again. If you already have an adblocker like 'Ad Blocker Plus' installed, you can block the entire 'addthis' domain. But I'm pretty sure it isn't something much to worry about since it requires creating custom rules to block the 'addthis' domain, which I know 99% of the people won't bother doing / won't know of.

[BestJewSinceJC]

"i think the most grievous offender is the row of "share this" "send that" "bookmark" "yadda yadda" buttons... I think they're ugly and extremely distracting/annoying. i would get rid of all that, because i never use any of that stuff. i think it would go a long way to cleaning up the clutter."

I disagree, I never even notice those things.

@ Dani - I like the overall layout of the site. It has one of the cleaner, nicer looking interfaces I've seen on a forum without being overly complex.

[cwarn23]

"i think the most grievous offender is the row of "share this" "send that" "bookmark" "yadda yadda" buttons... I think they're ugly and extremely distracting/annoying. i would get rid of all that, because i never use any of that stuff. i think it would go a long way to cleaning up the clutter."

I disagree, I never even notice those things.

@ Dani - I like the overall layout of the site. It has one of the cleaner, nicer looking interfaces I've seen on a forum without being overly complex.

If different people have different opinions then why not let the user have a section in their user panel where they can enable/disable features like this and perhaps for sponsored users to have the option of setting a custom theme. Just a thought but not sure how practical it is.