New Site Layout Takes SAR Team Through the Late Night
- Published ()
As most of our patrons may have already noticed, the SimAutoRacer.net design team spent Monday night redesigning the layout for the SimAutoRacer.net site. The redesign includes a revamp of the site logo, the formatting of the page to a fixed 1024 wide pixel format, and a restructuring of the SAR News Center. The entire design team was promptly laid off at 5 am in the morning after working all night on the release.
When asked why the change was made chief editor Dan Riffero stated, "We've needed to fix our layout for quite sometime. At first we hired a bunch of monkeys but most of the ideas that came out of that group's workshops revolved around bananas for some reason."
Additionally an article feedback area has been started in the News Center to facilitate getting the community at large more involved with the news process. "In the 4 months since the community forum was launched it has seen very little traffic", said Riffero. "We decided to prune the topics that were not getting used. The monkeys' wanted to open a 'Banana' topic but that seemed rather self serving for the individuals with the idea."
Among the possibly more controversial changes was a move to use a fixed 1024 wide page layout instead of the previous 100% window width format. Riffero seemed to indicate various design flaws were to blame for the change. "The issue was that when the browser window would get reduced down to around 800 pixels the in article images in the layout would cause some really undesirable display issues. We figure that most of our users are running their desktop at a minimum resolution of 1024x768, so we could make use of that much space for sure."
When asked if quality assurance had signed off on the changes Riffero replied "No comment".
Riffero gave a clear direction for the site to continue in. "Right now we are running at 200% load on our authors and 30% load on our system. Once we receive more content the ratio will change significantly and the quantity of updates will improve dramatically. Monkeys can only type so fast."