I mentioned in a previous blog, we’re working on a new look and structure to the site, that’ll make it crispier and easy to use. We’re about half way through the process, and I thought it was time to give you a sneak preview. Now of course there will be changes and so not to give the whole game away, I’m just linking to the new look home page below to give you a rough picture. The design is centred around the L shaped bar at the top and the right of the site. The top bit will be for navigation, the right for browsing and this’ll be on every page in the main site and the Chat Forum.
The new logo is almost complete, though I need to get a new picture for it. While the blue is definitely the main colour, the rest still has to be finalised. I think the browser bar will have a white, not coloured background, the recent articles a soft green rather than the blue, to distinguish between that and the most popular articles, plus a few of the proportions will change and the ‘This Site and Martin’ button’s prominence will be reduced. Yet overall this is roughly the shape of things to come. The articles’ pages, Chat Forum, and other sections of the site will fit into this new look and colouring.
The Chat Forum button is at the top right, and the colour will be changed to match the new forum colours. It’s also likely (if we can) that the browser bar will contain a link to the day’s previous most popular thread in the forum. I suspect a few forum comments will say “couldn’t you make the forum button bigger?” Well it’s just as prominent as it is now, and its current prominence is deliberate. New MoneySavers start with articles and are then drawn into the forum. There are only 100,000 forum members, yet 1,000,000 people use the site each month; most users prefer to gain info from the articles – the aim of the new design is to gradually move people into the forums.
I do hope you like it; the team is working very hard on it. So while critique is welcomed, please remember this is another step in an on-going process, and there are many different considerations (including disability access) that have to be taken into account in the design.
