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Way to switch back to old theme?

Telmnstr

By Telmnstr
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Telmnstr Burg

Telmnstr

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Is there a way to switch back to the old theme?

The new one just isn't as readable and clear, and makes me not want to use the site. No offense.

I felt a relief when I went to another site I visit that has clearly defined borders for all the table cells and what not.

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Neo City

Neo

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Is there a way to switch back to the old theme?

The new one just isn't as readable and clear, and makes me not want to use the site. No offense.

I felt a relief when I went to another site I visit that has clearly defined borders for all the table cells and what not.

I realize that there are some issues with the new design and I will be addressing those as they come. It isn't possible to go back to the old design because this wasn't just a skin change, this was a major upgrade to the software which was vastly rewritten. The old skin you were used to took me years to tweak based on user feedback and my own UI opinion. I plan to do the same tweaking to this skin, but I need input from you guys to speed things up a little.

I agree. This new design simply doesn't work from a usability standpoint.

You probably can tell from metrics; post counts are down, no?

Please let me know what doesn't work for you and I will do my best to accommodate you. FWIW, I have received more compliments on the new software and UI than I have against it.

Regarding post counts and traffic, I don't have much data to go on since we haven't been on this new software a week yet. However, thus far, post counts have actually increased and traffic has increased. New registrations are up around 400% since the upgrade.

There are users who absolutely hated the previous design of the site and those who loved it. Going into this upgrade I knew I would run into the same issues, but I do realize things need to be tweaked. I do ask that you give it some time. If you have specifics that you would like to see changed, then please let me know via this thread. Guessing at what you guys would like is just that, a guess.

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Neo City

Neo

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Ok, I recalibrated my monitor and I can see the site much better. It's now usable.

I assume I'm not the only one who had a miscalibrated monitor; so the colors may be a little too light for a lot of people.

I don't disagree with you on that part. I calibrate all of my monitors and I exclusively use Macs which tend to be better at color rendition anyway. I know that I had tweaked the previous version of the site to make the shades a little darker and I may end up doing the same thing here. On the other end of the spectrum, for those with calibrated monitors (or those really that are uncalibrated but to the other extreme), colors may appear too dark.

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Neo City

Neo

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The new theme doesn't appear to size well on my monitor. I'm at 1024x768 and the theme sizes larger than my resolution. I have to scroll to the right on every page. It's kind of annoying.

The site should not scroll now for those of you with lower resolution settings.

I have also tweaked some of the colors in the tables to make things 'separate' a little more as requested.

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Neo City

Neo

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I have tweaked the skin again to assist with those who were having trouble distinguishing between areas of the site. Please clear your browser's cache to see the new skin.

Does anyone else notice the whole site loading slower - seems more um... "jagged". Less smooth? I don't know the technical term...

We are experience a higher load on our site which we are investigating. I have made several changes to make things a little better, but there is still more optimization to be done.

The site is lagging on my end at times as well. One thing I noticed that could be part of the cause is the photos people insert in their posts loading much larger than they used to. Could we get the photos to scale down like the old software, but have the option of clicking on it to enlarge it?

I'm not sure why the images aren't resizing automatically for you as they are for others, including me. Please make absolutely sure that javascript is not disabled in your browser and that you have cleared your browser's cache.

This is what you should see:

post-1-1256736081045_thumb.png

When clicking on the image it will automatically expand to the original size.

post-1-1256736081045_thumb.png

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Telmnstr Burg

Telmnstr

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I guess it's the lack of clearly defined boxes. Before there was black lines around everything. Now it takes more effort to figure out what is what. When I jump over to city-data.com/forums it's like a relief.

I think I just got the new css and it does look better.

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  • 2 weeks later...
Spatula Whistle-Stop

Spatula

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Personally I can't stand the new theme. It hurts my eyes, and I've read the site sparingly since the switch. After looking at it for a long time, I think the problem I have with this theme from an aesthetic standpoint is the barrier between posts. It's just too busy--makes it hard to focus on individual posts.

Here's what I mean:

urbanplanet1.png

For 4 lines of post content, there is an entire screen full of internet garbage.

I tried cleaning it up a bit in MSPaint. See how much more readable it is? Simple one-color background with all the same information contained.

urbanplanet2.png

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Neo City

Neo

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Personally I can't stand the new theme. It hurts my eyes, and I've read the site sparingly since the switch. After looking at it for a long time, I think the problem I have with this theme from an aesthetic standpoint is the barrier between posts. It's just too busy--makes it hard to focus on individual posts.

Unfortunately the mock-up you did of the forum makes things run together for me and I expect it would do the same for others as well. I'm certainly willing to make further changes to the skin, but I need more than just one user asking me to make such a drastic change. Is anyone else having an issue with the forum running together because of what's outlined in the previous post?

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Neo City

Neo

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I think the problem is those signature breaks. They're still cluttering the page up. I've made another mockup with less intrusive breaks. If the posts still look too similar, one option could be putting a very light shade of gray on alternating posts.

You alluded to in your previous post that you were happy with the previous theme that we had before we did the upgrade. Now let me say that I haven't changed the way the signature breaks or the post headers look. The previous theme also had the background as the same shade (white as it is with this one) for every post. I bring this up because the way things flow and look hasn't changed. I'm trying to figure out what could be different that's making you not be able to read the site, but I'm scratching my head a bit.

That's not to say that it can't be changed or that it shouldn't be changed, but I'm just stating that nothing has changed.

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