One thing we’ve always known is that our site hasn’t looked particularly good. You may recall the old days of what looked like a desk with tools scattered about. And then the most recent green monster, with our old globe logo.
One of the great things about having support from you–our listener–and occasionally a sponsor here and there has been the monetary benefits that come with it…namely being able to hire people who know what they’re doing. Rachel Rivera from RadCastle did our awesome logo (now available for purchase in 4 different colors at The Amp Hour Printfection Store). The folks over at reddit host our makeshift forum/link gathering (after a couple disastrous tries otherwise). Dave and his penguin geeksquad also host The Amp Hour section on the EEVblog forum. And now some WordPress person has designed this theme that will make it look like we know what we’re doing with websites (we really really don’t).
The benefits here are that the navigation should be cleaner for you, across all types of viewing devices. The site is “responsive”, meaning it should look relatively the same regardless of the type of device you’re viewing it on; it will refactor to fit a computer, a tablet or a phone in some semblance of order. There are now ways to see if there are any comments on a post from the front page, hopefully encouraging people to participate in the conversation. And if you don’t care about any of that stuff? You can scroll to the show you want to listen to and play it right from the front page. Oh, and hopefully the page loads a little zippier than in the past as well.
We hope you like the new look and feel. If not, you can always revert to listening via iTunes, other types of podcatching apps, or you can just catch our RSS feed. We look forward to a bunch of great new guests in 2014 and hope you continue to listen to the show!
Hi Chris,
My main comment is, I don’t like the light orange text for links etc, its a bit hard to read on some screens, apart from that, the site layout looks good.
It’s pretty nice. I like the new site and especially the new logo a lot. But what I am missing is a button to the next/last article. If I am looking for something in some other episodes it is always irritating to go back and look for another article even when it is just the next one.
1
google-font-css
Please move fonts to your own server. Google is using this to track users (yes I know, lol tinfoil etc). Roboto family fonts are free so there is no problem with license, no point letting google have additional info for free.
2
50%? seriously? You limited useful content to the 50% of the screen estate. Its form over function, except this is a technical site, not Moma/Guggenheim.
Personally I will be using my own css
.site-header {
left: 1%;
max-width: 1200px;
width: 80%;
}
.site-container {
margin-left: 2%;
max-width: 1200px;
}
Other than that it looks really good and clean 🙂
Yeah, I agree about the 50% thing…but what do we need around here? Not much, IMO. Dave has repeated that sentiment as well. And as the page/monitor size shrinks (towards mobile), the container takes up a proportional part of the screen. So…maybe start using a tablet? 😀
Hello Chris,
Missing is a noscript version of the logo with alt text. I am missing the regular icons in Firefox 26.0 (showing a invalid charset), but they are fine in IE and Opera. Also, when viewed on my nexus phone, it only shows about 5% of the logo on top right of the screen in portrait and shrinks to a stamp sized image in landscape (maybe remove the logo for the mobile version or work more the css).
Looks good to me, nice work
The overall look and feel is very appealing but the sticky header takes up a lot of space and bolder fonts would be more readable. Those two issues could be fixed.
again about google tracking using fonts 🙂
link rel=”stylesheet” id=”google-font-css” href=”//fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Source+Sans+Pro%3A300%2C400%7CRoboto+Slab%3A300%2C400&ver=1.0″
yeah, Im pretty sure “//fonts.googleapis.com” works only because browsers are super nice to retarded/bad code
anyway, blocking *fonts.googleapis.com/* kills tracking and renders with standard font that actually uses Subpixel rendering and looks a lot better on my LCD 🙂
The protocol-less URL is actually a feature of modern browsers. The resource will be requested with the same protocol the page was downloaded in, so you don’t need to specify https or http.
I have just bought a tablet but even so my eyesight benefits from bigger text and less bling. I don’t spend a lot of time on the AH website but it is one site where a big press here to trigger podcast download would be useful. Banks changing websites and supermarkets rearranging shelf locations is enough to keep me busy getting annoyed.
Ditto on the Orange links on white background, bad choice there, but otherwise looks great.
Apart from the orange on white text it looks good
I’d like to recap what others have said. The links on the right don’t work if you have google blocked, orange on white is a bad idea for the links.
The content only being under 1/2 of the page width is crazy.
The sticky header isn’t causing me a problem, but I can see it would if you had something like a netbook with limited vertical space, making that smaller wouldn’t hurt anything.
you cant start relative url with “//”
Love the new look, the logo and layout.
Your web designers know what they’re doing – keeping a large part of the screen free of clutter makes it far more accessible and much easier on the eye.
Chris,
Looks really nice but there is too little space left for the actual content.
About the old logo, don’t discard it completely. Keep it alive. Use it in places like watermarks, headers or footers.
Ciao, CH!