New Design

There is now a new design for the page. I wanted to find something that made the “comments” a little more obvious. Further, I think a new design every three years is not too much. I would appreciate your thoughts on this, even if (especially if) you hate it.

One other change is that the “Things I am Reading” page is now “New from the OR Blogs”. The difference is that everything that appears on one of the OR Blogs now appears in the sidebar (not just things I flag). Of course, if it appears that some sites are not providing relevant material (I’m looking at you sci.op-research!), then I can simply drop them from the list.

Thoughts and opinions on the changes are very much welcome.

Added Oct 25. I decided to separate out the newsgroups from the blogs, since otherwise we might get a series of newgroups postings (particularly when they are in a flame ware on something) rather than the blog postings appearing in the left sidebar.

15 thoughts on “New Design”

  3. Looks good. My only real criticism is the default font size is a bit small, especially the font in the comment textboxes. With serifs, the textbox I type is quite hard to read. And the serif font in the boxes seems to override my default sans-serif setting. The sans-serif fonts in the displayed article and comments are quite readable, even at their default size.

    I’m reading this in Firefox in Linux on a 1280×800 display, FWIW.

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  4. Well, all readers of this blog should receive a new, larger monitor to make reading the blog a bit easier. In the meantime, I have increased the font size a bit. Better would be figuring out from the css file why the textbox has a serif font, but a bit of fiddling didn’t get me the desired result.

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  6. That’s a better size.

    I tend to prefer the sans-serif fonts on a monitor–and you are still overriding my settings on the entire page, but this is readable enough.

    Also worth noting is that the default Windows Firefox font seems larger (even when set to the same point-size) and the Linux fonts look better overall (at least with my settings) even though they are smaller.

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  8. A refresh is certainly useful from time to time. And I like the clean design. However, I would not have moved the pointer section (comments, blogroll, etc.) to the left.

    Readers – unless they happen to spend most of their time reading Hebrew or Arabic or Persian – tend to grok the big picture starting from the left. You want the eye to go first to your post, without setting up a visual hurdle for the visitor. A natural flow is especially true of a lean and substantive blog such as this one.

    (The likes of HuffPost can be candyland/Vegas gaudy with winking come-ons all over the screen. That works because it gets intra-day – even intra-hour – repeat visitors looking for fresh sizzle.)

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  9. I too prefer right sidebars. I spent some time trying to figure out if I could move the sidebar to the right in this design, but I would lose the “variable width” aspect of the design (the sidebar is fixed width, so you can place the main part as an offset in the css). I like the design but Sanjay has put his finger on what I don’t like.

    Or maybe I can play around with the css a bit more. And I think I have it working! I suspect it is broken somewhere, but I like the main page a lot more!

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  10. Like the new design – very clean – looks good.

    I usually read via my RSS feed, but click to the site from time to time.

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  12. Hi,

    Truly speaking that new design should be necessary for your blog at not more than 3 years interval.It is better to re optimized it according to search engines requirements.

    Regards

    Reply

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