Finally, after months of work, we can now reveal our new look. This is our ninth year online and this fresh new look also marks a whole new backend for the site. It’ll make updates, reviews and navigation a whole lot quicker and easier, but for those of you still wanting a flavour of the old design we’ve added this page listing our most recent posts.
We’ve taken some tough decisions along the way. Some parts of the site have been removed, some new ones added but we hope you’ll all enjoy searching through the new site and getting to know the new surroundings. I want to thank Kimb from Base6 for all the work and everyone who helped to move almost 7,000 news and review posts into the new system.
Just a small niggle – in each of the sections on the main page, there is a big (newest?) story on the left and several smaller (older?) stories on the right. The ones on the right have the date posted, but the one on the left doesn’t. Any chance this info could be added? Thanks.
We’ll take a look mate..
Where is the link to your blog at the bottom of the page?! Always was a good read…
A ripped-off wordpress theme and a few free plugins? I liked the old format, easy to read and see new items. Now it’s just an unnecessary mess 🙁
Thanks for the mention Gears, glad to help you move to WordPress and away from your old Joomla/Mambo/hacky hell 🙂
Look forward to seeing the new site grow.
Gears, looking good. A couple of hopefully constructive comments…
The header bar containing the logo seems awfully large with lots of white space above and below. Leads to a lot of wasted space and limited viewing.
I love the thingy at the top of the page (can’t for the life of me remember their names!), anyhow, when blowing the pictures up to view in there they are looking a little poor quality.
All in all, after 30 seconds of looking around – I like it alot. Much cleaner.
Liking the new look for 2011 and beyond!! One point – so far – I’d like to make…. I clicked on the HTC HD7 link and got lots of HTML code in amongst the review text; looks like some closing tags are missing or in the wrong place?
Oh, and where’s the link to the forum, or has that gone now?
i like it! A clean fresh look for 2011. well done
Really liking the new look – good work 🙂
Not sure that I like it tbh, kinda did prefer the old layout (BTW, that link in the post doesn’t exist). Still, change is good and congrats, and I wish you all the best for this year.
I’m with Jamie in that the header is much too large. On my x 1024 display you’ve got to get almost half way down the screen before you’re reading the article. And that’s in Chrome, no without loads of toolbars taking up valuable screen real estate.
That aside, I like it as it has a fresh feel about it.
Sorry not keen. It looks so plain, cheap and really hard to read.
Also it reminds of those cheap search pages that come up that are totally useless.
Mind you, if it keeps the cost down and makes Gear’s life easier, then I am all for that.
I agree with Jamie about the header bar – it’s awful – it takes about 1/4 of the page on my laptop! What a load of wasted space. Not keen on the new look – sorry.
SHould have mentioned earlier, I was hoping for a mobile version of the site as part of the re-fresh. Is this something that the new system will allow?
Also need to spell Everything properly at the top of the page. Spelling Typo – “- Everrything Windows Phone, Android and iPhone”
My comments would be like several have mentioned…
1) Logo space is too high at the top of the page
2) Width of main window is too narrow – don’t use pixel width use percentage width, e.g. on a 1600 resolution monitor it looks way too narrow
3) Love the ability to switch between platform e.g. Android or iPhone – that’s a really good move!
4) Personally I’m a fan of read the entire article on the newspage rather than the first couple of sentences but that’s a personal thing.
5) Had some very strange large news title fonts appearing although a couple of refreshes in Opera seems to have fixed.
Gears – I’ve been visiting this site nearly every day since the days of the SPV and I agree the old site did need a bit of a facelift. The new one looks good but I’m not really sure about the homepage. Here’s a few suggestions:
– On the old site I liked being able to just go on it scroll down and instantly see the last article I had read. I’d then just scroll up and read the new ones (skipping any that I wasn’t interested in – iPhone!). But now I’m having to go through all the categories separately. Also if its been a few days since I came on I’ve got to open each category separately to see more than 6 stories. Could you not put a scroll bar on the listings of the titles or an ajax button that loads a few more articles?
– Also I think that when you click on one of the article titles on the right it should load the article in the left panel (via ajax). That would save having to navigate away from the home page to see the article and then navigate back again to see others.
– Finally do you think it would be better having the ‘General’ category at the top?
Richard