22 thoughts on “Site Redesign”

1. Fancy (and “responsive”). The scrolling doesn’t quite work right for me on Chrome/Windows 7. When you get almost to the bottom it bumps you back up to the top.

   1. Well, it’s not clear how much of the responsiveness is due to the WordPress update, and how much to the new theme.

2. The thing that stands out the most to me is that it takes significant amounts of scrolling just to get through a post. I’m sure I’m not the youngest reader of the site, but I can’t imagine that the vast majority of the readers are old enough that the new, very-large font is a necessity or even a benefit.

   I’m hoping that it’s more a matter of default settings vs. what you would pick for a permanent setting, but I wanted to make my opinion known nonetheless.

   I’m also a bit put off by the default narrowness / the overly-generous margins/whitespace on either side of everything, but that’s a general gripe I have about most blogs/websites, not yours specifically. I would need to open one of the longer comment threads to see just how much/little room each comment takes up, especially some of the deeply-nested comments. My fear is that the font is so large and the margins so wide that there is only room for three or four words per line.

3. Would it make sense to drop the WP Mobile Pack? I would expect the site to be fine on mobile with this theme. Every plugin you can get rid of is a bonus (in my personal opinion).

   1. Probably. That’s supposedly one of the features. I’ll at least deactivate it for now.

4. Rand, the old problem of “invisible” comments that take a while to appear seems to be gone.

   Also gone; the old site’s occasional switch to mobile mode, even when using the switcher=desktop in the URL.

   The only thing about the new design that’s bad IMHO is the width; the right sidebar is at about midpoint on my monitor. There’s a big blank area of off-white to the right of it.

   If it’s easy to do, my suggestion would be to move the page edge to the right, to make the area for the posts wider.

   1. Looking at the templates now to see how hard it is to customize.

   2. Rand, the old problem of “invisible” comments that take a while to appear seems to be gone.

      Is not! The two most recent posts show “1 Comment” each, which I cannot view.

      Whatever’s causing the problem, it apparently isn’t the template.

      1. Any time I see “1 Comment” and no comments in the post itself, I just chalk it up to that particular comment being stuck in a moderation queue.

         Of course, if Rand doesn’t have a moderation queue, then my logic is completely flawed, but it’s what I’ve been telling myself to stay sane.

         Granted, when I see something like that and then the number of comments updates and changes after I post a comment of my own, that’s when I start to lose faith in the whole “moderation queue” argument.

         I also have plenty of strange caching behaviour on my computer with other sites, so I don’t always blame it on TTM.

5. I like twenty fourteen a lot. It would be nice to put the “comments/leave a reply” at the bottom of the post (or switch to using snippets so you can either read the post without scrolling and hit the comment button or click on the post to finish reading). I would also reduce the number of posts on the front page to maybe 10?

   1. I’m not sure how I feel about the “10 posts per page” thing. Especially on a day like today, where Rand is up over 10 posts for the day, so any posts earlier in the day have already been pushed off to Page 2.

6. It’s nice and clean, but I think a little color would help with understanding the hierarchy. Maybe just coloring the post title?

7. It looks ok but there’s a lot of needless whitespace and the actual posts, especially the post titles, do not stand out enough.

8. Much better.

   Please move the comments link to the end of the blog post. One would logically click the comments after reading your post.

9. Hey, as long as it doesn’t randomly send Chrome to the mobile site, I’ll be happy.

10. A vast improvement. I see the point that several comments have made regarding too much whitespace, but it has a clean, readable look to it, and it doesn’t throw me into mobile mode at random intervals.

11. Aside from the whitespace that I and others mentioned, is there any way to get the header to scroll up once one leaves the top of the page? It, too, takes up quite a bit of real estate, and looks awkward due to the stark contrast between black and white. It felt “off” to me for some reason, and as soon as I started visiting other pages with headers that disappear, it solidified that as what was out of place.

12. FYI, the Newsmax ad in the black sidebar is wider than the sidebar itself and spills into the white space, making the page look slightly “broken”. Plus, the ad’s background is transparent and it uses black font, so its links only show up where they spill into the white space.

    Other than that, like others have said, it’s a nice style and if it avoids pushing me the mobile site, it’s great.

    1. I know, I’m trying to figure out how to widen it. It’s surprisingly difficult. I followed some directions for custom CSS, and it didn’t have any effect.

13. Comments are not nesting properly.

    1. It’s hard to tell if they’re nesting properly, as there isn’t as much vertical space to work with, there’s a bunch of whitespace, and the offsetting of nesting isn’t nearly as drastic as on the old site design.

       With the myriad issues that Rand has had with the CSS, it’s hard to say how easy this would be to remedy.

14. When I am on the tablet and open a post on its own, the blog breaks and won’t let me close the page or any other pages I have open. I run a custom ROM with jellybean on an old Nook tablet and use Opera for a browser. This happens occasionally on other sites.

    I have to force close Opera and try and close the pages before they can load in order to get things normal again. This process is challenging because TTM has a fast load time 🙂

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