I was just going back through some of the old pages that have been saved since we launched this site. Google, because its crawler essentially lives on our site, has cached a lot of pages with the recent look. But I was able to find one from December 7.
This is how the general forum would have looked to a visitor (not logged in) on December 7:
This is how that same page looked this morning:
You'll notice that the navigation bar now has more links. Some of the folders, such as the red ones in the thread area, are no longer with us. The red ones indicated a hot thread. Uh, so many of our threads were hot that they were all red. No sense in having that, so I ditched those icons early on.
Similarly, none of the original font colors are the same. The ads have gone from being on the left side of the site to the middle.
Our logo, meanwhile, is much simpler today -- if not prettier.
The legend at the bottom of the site used to look like this:
Now it looks like this:
It's really just the little things around here. I'm constantly looking for places that can be shored up from an appearance point of view.
Separately, and finally, we had a record yesterday for visitors on the site. We're getting a lot more visitors come from Google searches. You only get one shot at a first appearance; I do what I do so that those first-time visitors like what they see. Of course, I hope the current membership is pleased as well. When everyone is happy, so am I.
Thanks, guys, for being part of this site. And thanks for having the patience to read through some of these kinds of posts.
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