Welcome To The New GottaBeMobile!
Over the past several weeks, I’ve been working on a new design for the GottaBeMobile.com site and am pleased to unveil it today.
There were several goals I had for this new design, which were confirmed from the “Open Mic” session we had several weeks ago.
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Improve the page load time – the new design is 66% smaller than the previous design, which should help with overall performance and page load.
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Utilize white space in an effective way to help readability, and stick with overall theme for consistent color treatment. We moved to a large left column for news content, and two right columns for ads. In addition, the two right columns are used for highlighting site news, features, InkShow videos, etc.
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Remove clutter and duplication. I wanted a design that was clean, crisp, and consistent.
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Consolidate Featured Stories and Cool Stuff
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Provide a better way to keep readers informed of new videos – notice the video clips on the right side that provide direct links to our videos hosted on Blip.tv
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In an effort to improve page load time, I also removed the drop down menus, which was causing a big performance hit. Instead of the dropdown menus, there are 4 simple links to the main areas of the site.
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On the bottom of the page, there are links for Older Posts / Newer Posts to allow you to page back through previous days. This was another repeated request from readers.
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For those of you who are wondering, we are still using dasBlog right now. My next task is to begin mapping out a migration to WordPress.
I still have some more work to do on the forum section, in addition to getting a tag cloud working for our news categories. I’ll also be tweaking a few colors, spacing issues, and font sizes over the coming days. In addition, we are continuing to work with our advertisers on decreasing the amount of animation in ads.
Feel free to leave your suggestions, feedback, etc; and as always, continue to let us know what we can do to improve your experience on GBM!
Rob Bushway
GottaBeMobile.com
