It's no secret that the current site style suffers from a few issues (slow repaint time in some browsers, visually distracting backgrounds, and a fair share of strange behaviour/bugs with resizing). We've been hinting at a redesign in the works for a while, and though we are still waiting on consultation in terms of design direction for that, I have decided to go ahead and start iterating on the design now rather than put off changes much longer.
Starting tomorrow, I will be pushing design iterations to the site, live. Comments, suggestions, and tips should be posted to the Feedback forum, which I'll be monitoring as I work on the design. We've opted to do it this way rather than deploy the iterated design to a subset of users because of two main considerations.
- We don't yet have infrastructure in place to deploy alternate versions of the entire site to certain users or over a different URL/port. This would not take terribly long to set up, but we are prioritizing other work more highly at the moment.
- We are still formally in Beta until the v1.0 release hits with all of the features we originally planned to include, and an iteration on the public design before launch does not seem entirely out of line with that in mind.
Some things to keep in mind as design changes roll out:
- If something looks off, first try refreshing (be sure to use your browser's cache-clearing refresh to ensure that old styles/images/fonts aren't being used) before reporting in the Site Feedback
- Your brain/computer might work differently from ours! If something becomes significantly less readable, harder to navigate, or harder to find, this is a bug we need to fix. We want the site to be usable by everyone across as many devices and browsers as possible. (We make no guarantees about old noncompliant versions of IE, but will attempt to make the style degrade somewhat gracefully).
- I, the main frontend dev, am doing this in the free time I can spare from university, so it may take me a while to address feedback. That doesn't mean I'm not listening!
Again, please give us feedback and as always, donating on our Patreon makes it easier for us to improve the site.
Cheers,
Andrew
