[SirRob]

sux so baaaad

[hclark]

Did we know a change was coming? Did it just happen today? I haven't been on lately and was surprised to see it had changed.

[fluffy bunny]

Personally i wouldn't mind the redesign if page access hadn't slowed down

[nicba]

I'm on a fast connection (cable) so I don't notice the slow-down. But I'm not really sure if I like the new design or not.

At first, I was rather irritated to see how small the screen area for the forum had become, but after having read a couple of posts, I'm about to get used to it.

The nice thing about it is that I will probably begin to read more of the short stories and (especially) the articles now that I can see the titles right there in front of me all the time.

I am currently using a 17" monitor in a resolution of 1024x768. But I could image that anyone using a smaller monitor or lower resolution (if such people still exists) would find the screen area for the forum is just too small with the new bar at the right side of the screen taking up so much room.

[saintjon]

I don't believe this will cause me to read any short stories, since I'm doing my best to ignore that sideboard.

[Alai]

I like it

[This message has been edited by Alai (edited March 12, 2002).]

[ChrisW]

right side bars sook http://www.sffworld.com/ubb/smile.gif left side bars rulz http://www.sffworld.com/ubb/smile.gif.

[SusF]

I like the new design. Thanks, Dag! http://www.sffworld.com/ubb/smile.gif

Susan

[JohnH]

**********************

[daigoro]

Sorry that I haven't posted an answer to this thread before. I simply wanted to give everybody some time to make their comments before I tried to explain the reason for the changes.

The main reason behind the changes is simply to keep the website alive. With the amount of traffic the website gets and the forum in particular I will have to move the whole website to another hosting provider in the not to distant future. This will allow me to expand the site further, upgrade the forum software, add more bandwidth consuming features such as an art section and lots of other things that I can't do with my current host. Anyway, in order to do this I will have to figure out how to cover hosting costs that are 5 times as high as they are today, and this is where the changes I have made comes to play. By making the discussion forum a more integrated part of the rest of the website design I was hoping that more people would check out the rest of the website also and thus generate more pageviews to the site and ultimately more money to cover the costs. Another thing I'm hoping will help is the "Support sffworld.com and buy your books from Amazon" part, that simply means that when people follow the links to Amazon and buy stuff, sffworld.com will get a commission from Amazon.

Then to the more technical aspects of the changes, yes the screen area for the forum isn't as big as it was and I realise that this can be problem for people that is running with low resolution. I'm using a 1024x768 resolution and I think that is ok

As for the slow down I'm actually very surprised that some of you are experiencing this. The thing is that the right sidebar is a javascript include file (sorry about the technical explanation here). Anyway, this means that it should be cached locally in your browser after the first time it's loaded. The rest of the code shouldn't be much different from the old either, even using fewer pictures than before. It would be interesting to know what type of browser those of you who are experiencing the slow down are using. It might be a Netscape issue. I'm accessing the site through a 64kb ISDN line and I'm not experiencing any slow down using IE 5.5.

Hope that gave you some answers to why I've made the changes.