GottaBeMobile - Welcome To The New GottaBeMobile! : Tablet PC & Mobile PC News & Video Reviews, and Tablet PC Forums

Monday, February 11, 2008

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Welcome To The New GottaBeMobile!

- Rob Bushway

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.

Improve the page load time - the new design is 66% smaller than the previous design, which should help with overall performance and page load.
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.
Remove clutter and duplication. I wanted a design that was clean, crisp, and consistent.
Consolidate Featured Stories and Cool Stuff
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
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.
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.
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

GottaBeMobile News

2/11/2008 12:35 AM MST

Welcome To The New GottaBeMobile! Comments [30] | Digg This | del.icio.us | Citations

Monday, February 11, 2008 12:54:25 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

hmmmmm.... it's a little too much for me. The posting/story section is too reduced visually.
I don't think it will help with new visitors at all.
If I stumbled upon the site now my first hasty reaction would be that the adds are as prominent as the content and the reduced size of the content makes it appear too dense to bother with anyway.
The small size makes it much less comfortable to quickly scan for new content I'm interested in.
I think you need to take the size of the central content back up and the size of the sidebar down a bit...
That, to me, is visually much more inviting and clear about what is the central content.
As it is now, when it loads the default text size actually appears larger in the "featured stories" section or the "archives" section over on the side bar than it does in the main/current stories section.
That may just be a function of color our boldness or font.
But that is the way it looks to me and it is kind of a turn off.

Sorry to be so negative; but, that is my opinion.

- mike

Mike

Monday, February 11, 2008 1:18:33 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

Rob,
I Cannot Login!

everbrave

Monday, February 11, 2008 1:19:05 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

I love it. When I first saw it I thought it looked so clean compared to the old layout. I don't know what mike meant by reduced size of the content because to me there seems to be more content because the column is not sandwiched between two others. I have no complaints about text size.

james

Monday, February 11, 2008 1:27:41 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

everbrave - the forum login should be fixed. My apologies.

Rob

Monday, February 11, 2008 1:32:44 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

I love the new design!

Let me know if you need any help or if I can answer any questions on your move to WordPress. It really is a great platform and I love it!

Andrew Ferguson

Monday, February 11, 2008 1:41:53 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

it's already better than the old site, but i also recommend you make the design flexible in its colum width (main column should be a percentage of the page width, not fixed pixel width): for low resolution devices (e.g. i'm on the OQO or the LS800 at 800 px, 600px or 480 px horizontal resolutions), we have to scroll horizontally.

and i agree that the right column should be a little narrower. otherwise, good job !

BurningOrange

Monday, February 11, 2008 1:43:56 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

I am finding the new design harder to read. Is the font size smaller?

Cuhulin

Monday, February 11, 2008 1:52:11 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

I like the main page. Loads faster and looks easy on eyes with white color scheme. But, I think the forum looks awkward. It carries the same amount of ads on the right side which makes the forum display window looks too narrow. Everything looks cramped and ads really start to annoy me there.

ignar

Monday, February 11, 2008 1:52:16 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

I just tweaked the size of the text. Not sure what happened there.

let me know...

Rob

Rob

Monday, February 11, 2008 2:12:09 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

I agree, the forum was a bit tight. I've adjustd the forum. I'll work on the sizing the size for smaller displays.

Rob

Monday, February 11, 2008 3:10:44 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

Design looks like gottabetechcrunch or gottabeweblogsinc. It's a shame there could be no ink reflection in the design given the focus of this site. Perhaps a logo written in ink or something? Ugly permalink structure too (dump the query strings).

With all that said, it's still an improvement over the former design.

TDavid

Monday, February 11, 2008 3:48:38 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

Thank god, looks a bit more professional now!

James

Monday, February 11, 2008 4:26:52 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

Definitely agree about this design being more professional-looking and clean. My only concern is that I do agree the ads need to be a little better spread out rather than clumped in the top right. Great work!

Also, the comment options are messed up in IE (Firefox is fine however).

GoodThings2Life

Monday, February 11, 2008 4:29:08 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

One more thought, it would be nice to have it scale down to 768*1024 for us lower-res Tablet users. :) (or at least 800*1280)

GoodThings2Life

Monday, February 11, 2008 5:28:58 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

The new site looks really clean. Nice work on the upgrade.

Benz145

Monday, February 11, 2008 6:01:23 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

Nice work Rob. THANK you for improving the Forum navigation!

MRPACS

Monday, February 11, 2008 6:48:00 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

* Improve the page load time -- Done with a capital D.
* Utilize white space in an effective way... -- Right direction but there isn't enough contrast. You need some bold colors to make the white pop. The grays and blue-grays don't cut it. Reminds me of an old template I used for my blog to try to keep the focus on the ink. It was a bad idea then, and I don't think it works here either. Not saying it should be as flashy as my current blog design, but sharp borders or a deep colored background would be nice.
* Remove clutter and duplication. -- Love it.
* In an effort to improve page load time, I also removed the drop down menus, which was causing a big performance hit. -- I'd rather see these re-coded and put back in.

Sumocat

Monday, February 11, 2008 8:44:18 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

First impressions are very positive.

It looks clean, is pleasing to the eye and loads faster.

Good work
Clavain

Clavain

Monday, February 11, 2008 8:57:22 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

As other have said, a very clean design...and it loads very very fast!!!! I like it very much. Good job!

Taliesin

Monday, February 11, 2008 9:05:50 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

Looks good. A bit Techcrunchy though. Not that it is a bad thing.

Vasanth

Monday, February 11, 2008 9:22:12 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

Very very nice!! Simplicity and ease of use is everything in this website. I simply adore it!!!

Willy

Monday, February 11, 2008 11:42:01 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

Looks great. I'm a fan of the no left sidebar templates.

Rodfather

Monday, February 11, 2008 11:47:11 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

The two big issues for me with the previous GBM site were the slow page load time and the excessive use of animation in the ads. The new site is a huge improvement in both of these areas. I'll defer to others about the layout and the appearance issues but to me the site looks good. Great job, Rob!

Mark (K0LO)

Monday, February 11, 2008 5:12:41 PM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

Its beautiful. Like a breath of fresh air. Maybe the font should be a little bolder bigger, but the layout is just, BAM! right on! Can find things more easily now.

archiwiz

Monday, February 11, 2008 7:36:39 PM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

Personally, I'm with Sumocat that the whitespace is a bit detracting at this point. It's actually hurting my eyes to look at it right now. Some form of lighter color mixed into the white, like a whited out version of GBM blue to keep with the theme. Something like that to vary the colors.

Tim

Tuesday, February 12, 2008 12:53:23 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

I like the changes you made today, making the articles more open.

Thanks.

Cuhulin

Tuesday, February 12, 2008 2:38:03 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

"Utilize white space in an effective way"? White space is white space... But the available space isn't used in an effective way: 50% is simply grey (left and right). Sorry, but such fixed layouts are not state-of-the-art.

M. Teddy

Tuesday, February 12, 2008 8:55:34 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

Wow! Looks great as an RSS feed in Thunderbird. No two pages of black on blue headers. Nice, clean, sparse. Fast loading. Good job.

(Sorry, if this is a double post, but I think TB doesn't correctly honor buttons in RSS/email view pane.)

sfwrtr

Tuesday, February 12, 2008 9:57:30 AM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

Too white for me :(

Wont stop me visiting though :)

Rob E

Tuesday, February 12, 2008 3:42:49 PM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)

Clean, streamlined, clear impact on first sight!

Increased text size is easily handled in Firefox with Ctr +. I do that often for easier reading from a distance.

Sunnyside777

Comments are closed.