Don’t worry readers, I’m trying an experiment. WUWT has looked the same for about 3 years, so I’m giving it a makeover. I’ve activated a newly designed theme for WUWT. This one has advantages over the old one in that it does a better job of supporting newer hi-res monitors such as the 20-24″ LCD/HDTV models that are becoming popular.
It also provides for larger text and images, better visibility of links, plus a few other features including a custom background which I’ll get to later.
In the meantime, let me know what you think in the poll below.
Sadly, no I still can’t offer an edit feature. wordpress.com hosting doesn’t support it.
UPDATE: Some readers say they can’t see links on the right side. They are there, try the horizontal scrollbar or set your monitor to a higher resolution. Also, wordpress during the upgrade nuked all my widgets on the right hand side, working to restore them -A
UPDATE: all the sidebar widgets are now restored. -A
UPDATE from CTM: Firefox users should install the CA assistant and greasemonkey.
http://climateaudit.org/ca-assistant/
This gives you full previews and some preview and formatting buttons.
Make sure to set your installation settings to not hide old comments or much will disappear.
Comment Tab:
- “Old” and “New” comments are defined by age in hours.
- You can hide all old comments (default: 48 hours). Hiding older comments is a great way to simplify your view of more intense discussions. (On Lucia and RomanM’s sites, the content of old contents disappears, but Author/Date remain. Nice!)
Tom says:
April 27, 2010 at 11:59 am
I basically hate change of all kinds, so my reaction is “eh” at best. But it’s your blog, you should do whatever makes you happy.
And something that makes him happy is when the consumer is happy. As both a businessman and a TV/radio personality, he knows about giving the public what they want. And also knows when “what they want” is not what they need which they will be happier with instead. 😉
Has that bland/boring stock look to it while the previous theme was pretty exciting (relatively.) At least have a contest for your readers to create a replacement for that mind numbing banner at the top of the front page.
Love the clean look. In Firefox 3.5.9 everything is well visible, font looks like Times Roman.
What’s this <del> all about:
test of del.Oops – my typo on <del>. So, it’s an
<strike> with a date stamp? At least the timestamp shows up in the HTML source.Just how old are you? Even at close to 50 this font size is ridiculous. I have to hit ” ctrl – ” in firefox just to get things to fit. Are you trying a late April fool’s joke?
I can read this from across the room. Too funny. Must be a slow news day for the A man. Other than the font it’s okay 😉
Still looks like “Commentary on puzzling things in life, nature, science, weather, climate change, technology, and recent news by Anthony Watts,” so it’s a winner! 🙂
Look at all those tags.
I agree with Tenuc – the stark white has always been a torture to my old eyes. I never complained before but, since you are changing things around at this time, perhaps you could consider those who suffer from dry-eye (symptoms are the opposite) and other age related visual impairments.
That apart, the changes are very much for the better and I love them!!!!!!
I like it. Easier to read, except for the type in the banner.
But its already clogged up with “deniers.”
Too much vertical white space. Looks like it could easily be cut by 50%. Otherwise it is good.
And it would be nice to have more voting options.
I can’t say that I “love” it but its better than just OK. Just to stay positive I will temporarily fall in love with it and vote accordingly.
I like the layout, and concur with the others that this is YOUR house and I’m just pleased to be able to come visit. But since you requested feedback, it would help me if the comments carried a sequential number in addition to the date/time stamp (see Jo Nova’s site for one example). Often one commenter will refer to another person’s input and though it is possible to use the date/time stamp to find my way from one comment to another, the number system makes this process much easier.
Smokey says:
April 27, 2010 at 11:40 am
> Graphics test:
No fair – it works for you, doesn’t work for me.
Hmm, let me copy what shows up in the source:
This page is doing an incremental scroll, the main page isn’t, is that a new tweak? Pain in the butt for scanning a page looking for a particular comment.
In general I like the layout and theme, but don’t care for the font. Also agree somewhat with making the background a little darker than #FFFFFF. Tightening up the whitespace vertically would be nice too. Overall a push.
I’m sure it’s nice, but since I use a netbook it was convenient for everything to be smaller. I guess I’m the minority but I liked the old setup.
Anthony, Ben U. thought you need to reduce the resolution of pic at top, don’t, it will only make the picture fuzzy, I checked, it is res sized and compressed correct. He also thought making font smaller, don’t, he must be a youngster, my font size is now at Largest setting and at 100% zoom and any smaller I could not read it. At these settings, Largest type size and 100% zoom the type appears to be about 10 point from a typographer’s aspect. (I will miss Lucida Sans though and the type is a bit too grey, maybe halfway between current grey and black!)
I agree with others, the logo is too close to realclimate and needs the SUN, don’t leave the sun out, but the clouds and vapor is great, that tells the whole story!
Anthony,
I like the re-design but this is a matter of personal preference. The most important thing about WUWT is the content. You could inscribe with goose-quill on parchment. scanned onto the server and people would still come to read what has become internationally recognised as the world’s leading climate/weather/what’s-it-doing-outside-today blog!
Keep up the good work!
Oh and on the old page, I could have 3 or 4 comments up on my screen at once.. where this is so big, I have to scroll down after each and every comment to read the next one. Call me lazy, but it’s annoying LOL
Initial impressions:
1) Probably a mistake to put the poll up so soon (‘first-impression’ ‘knee-jerk’ sample). Advised: Largely disregard polling results & re-poll later.
2) Home page loads much faster – welcomed.
3) Main thing is one never has to scroll left-right to read individual lines of text (or adjust magnification to compensate). Sites with that issue are absolutely infuriating. (No problem here so far.) The opposite problem is nearly as irritating – i.e. everything squeezed into a stupidly narrow column – (again: no problem here on that front – actually better now than before).
4) Like the grey text. Recommended to readers: Try locking your browser to Arial font.
5) Larger comment-entry-box: welcome.
6) Older date-stamp was preferable, but this is definitely NOT a dealbreaker.
7) Other changes have my full support so far (but it’s early days).
As several others have suggested, the look is fine, but the line-spacing (or perhaps line-height) is too large. No other problems.
/dr.bill
I’m a bit worried that the increased albedo will trigger an iceage and snow blindness.
Every website needs an update every couple of years. Great job! Some will not like it but if the design is sound and the look clean, and the features functional we all will be in great shape! Thanks!
It’s still mobile-friendly. That’s appreciated.
It still does not display properly on my computer running XP Professional and IE 6.0. The right hand column with links and widgets starts at the very bottom of the page where the left hand column ends. (Below the comments section.)
I would like the purple text in the masthead better if it were more crisp looking. Everything else looks sharp and clean.
REPLY: IE6 won’t display many websites properly. I recommend upgrading to Firefox. I say this from experience, having been hardwired to IE6 myself for years. Firefox does it better, faster, cleaner. And it will import all your settings. – Anthony
The new format looks good on my old Advent laptop.
Don’t ask its details I only type on it and give it the occassional bash.
Ok,it’s grey with a coffee ring stain in the right hand corner.
Seriously though.Thank you all at WUWT for doing a great job for us. from DaveUK.
Not to be confused with David UK who is innocent 🙂
I like it Anthony – and I have found the RHS data links!