Possible New Site Design (in General)


Relic January 10 2008 10:21 AM EST

Have a look at the site I put together last night. It gets rid of frames, keeps the fixed width that Jonathan is keen on, and is easier to style from a theme standpoint.
Click to see the design

Eurynome Bartleby [Bartleby's] January 10 2008 10:33 AM EST

It actually looks real nice, and also rather efficient but wouldn't it stray away from the Cell-Phone compatibilty CB seems to be geared to?

Relic January 10 2008 11:02 AM EST

Well I was thinking of having a separate single page for phone users that could be used for fighting only.

Eurynome Bartleby [Bartleby's] January 10 2008 11:16 AM EST

Might be an interesting way to look at the re-theme of this place. As CB slowly crosses the line that defines cell-phone compatibility and browser compatibilty, two different ways to access fighting via a phone and the entire site via browser is probably going to be appreciated, if not necessary.

It makes sense to me, at least.

Lord Bob January 10 2008 1:19 PM EST

I have to say I like it.

drudge January 10 2008 2:22 PM EST

Grats Lord Bob on the tutorial; I'm your mentor!

SNK3R January 10 2008 2:34 PM EST

What about forging?

I think the setup has potential. However, one comment:

With fighting (or forging), the whole page would have to be reloaded (unless put in a new bottom-frame) to display the results. Therefore, in the current setup (Glory's link), users would have to "download" (see: view) ALL contents of that page (although that tab does not show, the browser reads all of the other tabs' contents). So, people on dial-up might bicker about the "long load", perhaps when the server is lagging, people won't appreciate how long it takes to load EVERYTHING when, theoretically, you just want to load the battle results, though I suppose if this is a "complaint", it surely is a minor one.

I still like that there is a lot of room for displaying each tab's content. Also, by getting rid of the sidebar frame, you've also managed to be able to display even more information than the current CB's display (in width), which is also nice.

Relic January 10 2008 4:45 PM EST

All dynamic content (fights, store content, forum postings) would all load into the main pane under the navigation using AJAX. It would actually be just as fast as the current solution. Only the content needed for each page is sent back. There would be little to no need to do full page refreshes at all.

AdminJonathan January 10 2008 5:14 PM EST

ajax is the new hotness but it's way more complex for something like this than frames, which is exactly the use case they were designed for. I don't see a good reason to tweak everything just because it's the flavor of the week.

I like the tab navbar though.

AdminNightStrike January 10 2008 5:52 PM EST

It doesn't load for me...

AdminQBnovice [Cult of the Valaraukar] January 10 2008 6:05 PM EST

claiming that an AJAXified page will load as fast as standard content is hilarious...

AJAX heavy pages tend to bring slower computers to crawl, not to mention what you get with a slow box AND dialup.

AdminNightStrike January 10 2008 6:19 PM EST

That depends entirely on how the javascript XML downloads are implemented. To do it properly, the intial page load should have little do no simultaneous connections. Only on a user action should a secondary download take place. At that, you can choose to have any XML download be synchronous or asynchronous, with vastly different performance results between the two. If you implement it properly, it will instead make things much faster, since you only have to redownload small parts of the page. However, this, like most things, can be easily converted into a horrible way to transmit data over the web. That doesn't mean that it's bad or slow or anything else -- it means that the developer is an idiot.

Lord Bob January 10 2008 6:22 PM EST

"Grats Lord Bob on the tutorial; I'm your mentor!"

What?

Relic January 10 2008 9:25 PM EST

I would be happy to continue with the design if there is enough reason to continue with it. I could even mockup a simple example of what the battle functionality could be. I could also fill in some of the content to give you an idea of layout. But I don't see any reason to spend much more time unless Jonathan would seriously consider the revamp, not just merely a re-design.
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