New Page Design

If you are reading this you have hopefully seen our new page design on the title page. Please do let us know what you think of it as we are keen to correct it if it isn't right.

For a long time now we have wanted a new design for the page. The previous design (still in use on most of the site) whilst being very pretty and holding a great deal of sentimental value has been reaching its limitations. To go through a couple of them:

As we have added new features we have added new links on the left, when we started the site the links on the left stayed nicely on the screen. Now unless you are running the site at some outrageously large screen resolution then you can never see all the links.

Space, when we started the site we had no real content apart from a seed list of pubs. Now we have over 30,000 pictures, and a growing list of reviews and web links. Where pubs have more than 1 picture as is increasingly happening then the page ends up looking particularly messy especially in lower resolutions. When we started though we had to try and make the pages look interesting even though they had nothing but a name and address on them, consequently now where they have lots of pictures and links to maps they end up looking very busy with the navigation and design getting in the way.

We have made the decision to release the new design in a staged manner, so firstly on the home page. We anticipate the next changes being the Country and County pages. Whilst this is a messy decision, with the site changing appearance dramatically as you use it, it does mean that we can get early feedback off the users so that we can try and make sure the design works better. And also it means that our users can see work in progress on the site, it is going to take a lot of time to get the whole of the new design out and we want our users to know that the site is still alive rather than think we are deserting it as they may do if we don't do any new releases.

I will continue to comment on the new pages as they are released through my blog, please do feel free to leave comments on it so that we can do our best to improve it.

Also just in case anyone is technically minded - The new design uses a template where we constrain the navigation to the top, so as you scroll down the page you should get more detail, whilst still being able to navigate quickly off the page if it is not what you want. Some decisions were made in the design of the page as well, we have not supported Internet Explorer 6, I would think the site will still work in it, but there has been no conscious checking to make sure and in lower resolutions the page will look very odd in IE6. Also we have used some commands that IE doesn't support yet and won't be in the near future. Myself I use the excellent Firefox, as a developer it is invaluable due to some of the add ons that allow me to quickly check my work. I would definitely advise it to anyone, if for no other reason that hopefully if people use it it will give MS the kick up the arse they need to make IE anywhere near as good.