ServeTheHome 2013 Re-Design

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Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
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Since between the Friday before Christmas and New Year's is a very slow time for the site, I'm taking the opportunity to do some upgrading. Turns out Friday and Saturday evenings are also very slow times.

If you look at the main site right now you will see the new theme's look. Still have a few todo's:
1. Add user reviews (yes really)
2. Fix Colors. Right now black/ white and shades of grey. EEK!
3. Convert review posts to the new "Review" template.
4. Update "old" content. May just do 2012 since that is still a few hundred articles.

Will be switching back to the old look when I am not doing "live" testing (some of the site needs to be on the live site not the dev site to work.)
 

Patrick

Administrator
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Dec 21, 2010
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Still working on this, but it seems to run stable. (*crosses fingers*)

Here is a post with the new Review Style. Still not 100% there, but moving in the correct direction. Using some of the older articles to test with.

Still working on things like having tabbed sections.

Good news is that this is a MUCH better framework. It will take a bit more horsepower but should work well once the dust settles.
 

cactus

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Jan 25, 2011
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The abstract(bottom line) will show on the main page? Also, with your test article, the ad space is overlapping the pictures, maybe run a wider fixed width. A wider page may not be best for mobile users, but in current form, there is ~2-3 inches of unused space on either side of the main fixed width portion when full screen on my 1600x1200 monitor. Some ads are also overlapping the right edge of their frame. I understand it is a work in progress and I like the direction it is going. It is nice to see the page evolve.
 

Patrick

Administrator
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Dec 21, 2010
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The abstract(bottom line) will show on the main page? Also, with your test article, the ad space is overlapping the pictures, maybe run a wider fixed width. A wider page may not be best for mobile users, but in current form, there is ~2-3 inches of unused space on either side of the main fixed width portion when full screen on my 1600x1200 monitor. Some ads are also overlapping the right edge of their frame. I understand it is a work in progress and I like the direction it is going. It is nice to see the page evolve.
Thanks for the feedback.

That article didn't have re-sized images. It was published on STH v1.0 way back before there was a right sidebar. The image widths there are over 800 in many cases. Now the site uses 600px wide images. You can see that here: http://www.servethehome.com/supermicro-hyper-speed-server-overclocking-bios/

On mobile devices the blank space on the sides is simply not shown. that is one of the other changes. The new design also gives tabbed sections and expandable sections. Fairly excited about those. CSS skills are getting slightly better too.
 

Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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Today's article on using Putty with RemoteApp for a Windows RT device was the first one to use tabbed sections. You can see these (only two tabs though) just above the Conclusion with links to get Putty and RemoteApp Tool.

It also used a call out which was used in yesterday's Hyper-Speed Benchmarks article.

Some of the new features with the 2013 re-design. Goal is to continue using 1 page format but now will be able to do more in a touch device friendly non-scrolling manner.
 

Patrick

Administrator
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Dec 21, 2010
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Currently using swagger mag. More excited about ServeMy.Biz's features though.
 

Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
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That's cool. I can't count how many themes I have messed with. I always fall back to the Twenty Eleven theme.
Yea, I was using a WooTheme recently as it was a recommendation from Terry @ wegotserved.com

Worked well, but support tapered off. Slider and a few other features had issues with caching plug-ins and minify. Other "simple" stuff these days, like having the social buttons was not stock.

Twenty Eleven is good, but sometimes it helps to just pay for someone else to do a lot of the lifting. Good themes have backend options that make administration easier.