Define Cynical Fan Forums

So the preview of the new site layout is open, what do you guys think of it?

http://www.ozyandmillie.org/index2.html

I'm liking the idea of changing the layout, but I'm not keen on the new title, mainly because it has a tagline and I've always felt O&M doesn't need one. Also the positioning of the date and strip name looks a bit odd where it is as it doesn't line up with anything, maybe it would be better to have the strip name where the tagline is or back to where it used to be under the strip?

Also the news box and all the blank blue space looks untidy, but I think that's because of the sidebar rather then anything else.

As I said though, I think tis a good idea to change it so keep up the good work .

I like:
-The background colour. White is just too plain.
-The navigation on the side.
-The title. A tagline, while not nessesary, is no big problem for me, and I like the look of the text here and on the navigation links.

I dislike:
-The strip date and title being up in the corner there.
-The fact that there's no archive navigation buttons at the bottom of the strip. Having them at the top is fine too, but I think there should be another set at the bottom.
-The white text doesn't quite look right on the background color, especially the smaller text. I'm being extremely nitpicky here, but I'm thinking a slightly lighter- or darker-coloured box surrounding the text area might be an improvement.

Overall I like it...it's a big improvement over the old design.

The House Rules link still needs fixing.

Other than that, it looks pretty good... but it's so BLUE!

I like:
-The background colour. White is just too plain.
-The navigation on the side.
-The title. A tagline, while not nessesary, is no big problem for me, and I like the look of the text here and on the navigation links.

I dislike:
-The strip date and title being up in the corner there.
-The fact that there's no archive navigation buttons at the bottom of the strip. Having them at the top is fine too, but I think there should be another set at the bottom.
-The white text doesn't quite look right on the background color, especially the smaller text. I'm being extremely nitpicky here, but I'm thinking a slightly lighter- or darker-coloured box surrounding the text area might be an improvement.

Overall I like it...it's a big improvement over the old design.

Pretty much the same here, except that I don't quite have a problem with white text (though that may be a side effect of my monitor getting old and the colors a little distorted). And I rather like the way a white background looks, but I'm okay with the new one.

I'll also add that putting the links on the side facilitates the new vertical comic format quite nicely.

I like it. It's so much more inviting than the old one (which seemed a little stark).

I like:
-The background colour. White is just too plain.
-The navigation on the side.
-The title. A tagline, while not nessesary, is no big problem for me, and I like the look of the text here and on the navigation links.

I dislike:
-The strip date and title being up in the corner there.
-The fact that there's no archive navigation buttons at the bottom of the strip. Having them at the top is fine too, but I think there should be another set at the bottom.
-The white text doesn't quite look right on the background color, especially the smaller text. I'm being extremely nitpicky here, but I'm thinking a slightly lighter- or darker-coloured box surrounding the text area might be an improvement.

Overall I like it...it's a big improvement over the old design.

What he said. Also, I'm all for changing the layout of all of the other side menu pages to match the home screen layout colorwise, etc. Overall, good job and yay! It was time for a change. On another note, I now have Eiffel 65's "Blue" stuck in my head. "I'm blue....ba bo dee ba boo dy....Ba bo dee ba bo dy ba bo dee...." AARRRRGH!!!

Yeah, points lost for referencing that damn song... RRRRGH!!! I'm gonna have it stuck in my head for the rest of the day. AGAIN.

But I do like the color, I think. I assume the nav buttons will turn blue also when the rest of the site gets regenerated. I'm with osprey on the title-on-the-side thing though; it really makes no sense at all to put it there. Other minor nitpicks: the rounded edges of the whitespace aren't especially well done (and have slightly the wrong shade of blue); and the trademark symbol looks like some type of OCR machine font.

But yeah, overall, I for one welcome the new layout.

I dunno leaves me feeling a bit blue. Orange you gonna change it? I pink it would look better yellow.

(Translation, I don't like the colour, but the layout is pretty cool.)

Blue is perfect. New design is definitely better (and I didn't say that when the last design was introduced to replace the brownish one before that.)

And yellow would be DREADFUL. What are you thinking? ARBY'S?!

The House Rules link still needs fixing.

Oh, right, remind me what the new URL is?

I dunno. The old link on my Favorites list still works. And despite different URLs, they both look the same. Also, Caigan hasn't given us any news on how he's been doing since last month.

mhh I don't know. I'm sure it will grow on me in like a week or so.

Not bad, but it will take a bit of getting used to. There's just so much blue. I'm not sure I like how the inside of the lettering is also blue, but whatever. I do very much like the addition of the little image of Ozy and Millie off to the right ^-^

Nice. Just need to update some of those old images like the arrows and e-mail image.

He needs someone to go make him or otherwise incorporate some PHP/MySQL comic/news thing... from what I can tell he has to update the HTML pages by hand. If I had to do that it would drive me nuts after about a week.

Of course I suppose he could already be using something that GENERATES these HTML pages for him, but I don't care for such systems myself. Doesn't make a difference in bandwidth, only CPU time, and I can't imagine any system where that type of optimization makes that much difference. Besides with PHP you end up with about 1000 less HTML files cluttering up everywhere, AND you can change every page at once if you tweak a design. Whee.

Or he could be ultra sneaky and be using PHP right now and just disguising urls so they LOOK like static pages*... but very few people go through the trouble to be that sneaky.

* - This could be done when moving to PHP so existing page links could be preserved, if that's important. Just takes a little transparent redirection of HTML files through PHP, and a little mod_rewrite and regexps to redirect the 1000s of archive pages to one PHP script.