Website Redesign Launched

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Website Redesign Launched

PostPosted: Sat Jan 03, 2015 5:50 pm

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Anubis
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So, as I guess all of you can see by now, we've just launched our brand spanking new SSX website today - encompassing both the main site and the forums.

For the last couple of months MS and I have been beavering away on this update, and whilst it's taken a little longer than I might have liked I hope you'll all agree it's been worth the wait. Huge, huge thanks to MS for coming up with the design for us - without his creative eye, none of this would be possible :)

Above and beyond the reskin that you see, though, there's an awful lot more changes that have been implemented today:
  • The site and forums are now both fully responsive for the first time ever, meaning that we're now very accessible on mobiles, tablets, and other devices.
  • We've integrated long requested Social Sharing functionality, which you can find at the bottom of every topic and included in every full news post on the main site, allowing people to easily share our content.
  • We've integrated closer than ever with Twitter and our own Forums, allowing us to promote content from both across our main website.
  • And for the more technical, we've re-architected the website solution so that it's using HTML5, CSS3, jQuery and MVC. This makes it FAR more maintainable and a much improved platform to build on in future.
Obviously though, particularly since this is our first reskin since 2008, there's the possibility that people may come across issues that we've missed during testing, or suggestions on how to improve things. If so, please post them here and we'll add them to the list to be looked at over the coming weeks - which can be found in the post below.

I hope you all enjoy the new website :)
"Perhaps this is what I have always wished for since that day. The loss and destruction of all. That's right, one must destroy before creating. In that case, if my conscience becomes a hindrance to me, then I will simply erase it. I have no other choice but to move forward....therefore!" - Lelouch vi Britannia/Zero, Code Geass: Hangyaku no Lelouch

Forever an eXile and proud of it!

Re: Website Redesign Launched

PostPosted: Sat Jan 03, 2015 5:53 pm

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Anubis
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Issues to be looked at
  • Modifying new lightbox system so that when expanded images are clicked, their full sized variants open in a new tab - to allow users with smaller screens to see the full images. BlackDove
  • EVE Killboard styling fixes. Anubis
  • 404 issue from legacy URLs. Anubis
  • Character encoding issue on the main site for some browsers (Kara no Kyókai etc).
  • Italic code within news posts causing issues? MS.
"Perhaps this is what I have always wished for since that day. The loss and destruction of all. That's right, one must destroy before creating. In that case, if my conscience becomes a hindrance to me, then I will simply erase it. I have no other choice but to move forward....therefore!" - Lelouch vi Britannia/Zero, Code Geass: Hangyaku no Lelouch

Forever an eXile and proud of it!

Re: Website Redesign Launched

PostPosted: Sat Jan 03, 2015 6:35 pm

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Whizbang
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:thumb: to both MS and Anny. Site is very shiny. Do like. :D
Walk on with hope in your heart
And you'll never walk alone

[16:22] <SoulSeeker> i know its not the pc version but i kill kids for fun

<whizbang> Who's the ref?
<Isileth> Some dickhead

Re: Website Redesign Launched

PostPosted: Sat Jan 03, 2015 6:35 pm

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M.Steiner
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Another great team effort methinks so a huge thanks for your time and expertise too, Anny. Couldn't do one without the other <3 ;)
Really, really happy with the new site & forums along with all the improvements and features they bring so hope everyone else is too!. They've been a while in the making but have definitely been worth the wait.

As said, the new look covers both the main site and forums so be sure to check the former out when you have a sec too (and if you would like to be able to post news & stuff to the front page, just ask!) :thumb:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Re: Website Redesign Launched

PostPosted: Sun Jan 04, 2015 4:31 am

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Kon
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I'd like to thank Anubis and MS for all their hard work. The new site is exceptional and it's great to see the community's overhaul continue thanks to the people who volunteer their time and effort.

In IRC we were discussing readability and several mockups were thrown around to illustrate various ideas we had. At the end of that discussion, it seemed like we agreed to stick with MS' three-layered reply frame, make the body the darkest part, and keep the page background the same as it is now.

I know the Brits needed to head off after that, but based on MS' last mockup, I came up with this, which I think fits the criteria. What do you all think?

Image
"We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution."

Re: Website Redesign Launched

PostPosted: Sun Jan 04, 2015 1:13 pm

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M.Steiner
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Few thoughts on your mock-up:

- The header & trim backgrounds are far too light for such big areas of the layout imo, especially the trim. The latter stands out above everything else on the page and my eye is constantly drawn towards it. It needs to sit nicely behind the content which I think it does just fine as it is. If it were me, the only colour I'd probably change is the background behind the main body of post text if that will make it easier on the eyes for some people, leaving the other 2 colours as they are.
- Side note: We should leave the colour scheme on the index exactly as it is right now as I think that's perfect but if we change too many colours around on the viewtopic (this right here) the pages are not going to flow from one to the other very well. We can probably get away with 1 colour change for the main body of posts but changing the trim and stuff on top of that would throw the balance off I feel.

Anyway, as long as you guys are happy with the outcome, people use it and the colour scheme doesn't go backwards and start looking worse than it did before. I'm cool :)
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Re: Website Redesign Launched

PostPosted: Sun Jan 04, 2015 4:54 pm

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Anubis
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Following a lot of discussion and mocking up of suggestions, I've applied a reversal to the Viewtopic page colours.

Thoughts anyone? Does it help? :)
"Perhaps this is what I have always wished for since that day. The loss and destruction of all. That's right, one must destroy before creating. In that case, if my conscience becomes a hindrance to me, then I will simply erase it. I have no other choice but to move forward....therefore!" - Lelouch vi Britannia/Zero, Code Geass: Hangyaku no Lelouch

Forever an eXile and proud of it!

Re: Website Redesign Launched

PostPosted: Sun Jan 04, 2015 9:12 pm

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Padishar
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A HUGE thanks to you both!!!
Your hard work and time spent overhauling the site really makes an impressive difference :thumb:

Re: Website Redesign Launched

PostPosted: Sun Jan 04, 2015 9:31 pm

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Padishar
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Just noticed that our main home page scale looks great on my 1080P PC screen,
and the formatting on my smart phone and tablet are spot on.

Unfortunately, the topic drop down menu's on the mobile version seem to be slightly too transparent.
Since the drop down menu's overlap the topic menu, due to the reduced screen real estate,
It makes them a bit hard to read/differentiate from each other.

Would it be possible to make the mobile drop down menu's slightly less transparent?

Re: Website Redesign Launched

PostPosted: Mon Jan 05, 2015 12:44 am

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Anubis
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Padishar wrote:Just noticed that our main home page scale looks great on my 1080P PC screen,
and the formatting on my smart phone and tablet are spot on.

Unfortunately, the topic drop down menu's on the mobile version seem to be slightly too transparent.
Since the drop down menu's overlap the topic menu, due to the reduced screen real estate,
It makes them a bit hard to read/differentiate from each other.

Would it be possible to make the mobile drop down menu's slightly less transparent?
Any chance you could take a screenshot for me Pad?

I can definitely look at fixing it, but I'm not 100% sure I can picture what's going on exactly. If possible, a visual would be great :)
"Perhaps this is what I have always wished for since that day. The loss and destruction of all. That's right, one must destroy before creating. In that case, if my conscience becomes a hindrance to me, then I will simply erase it. I have no other choice but to move forward....therefore!" - Lelouch vi Britannia/Zero, Code Geass: Hangyaku no Lelouch

Forever an eXile and proud of it!

Re: Website Redesign Launched

PostPosted: Mon Jan 05, 2015 1:23 am

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M.Steiner
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Just a quick note to say that the forum icons have been updated so if those are displaying a little weird for you, you'll need to force refresh or clear your history. The new icons (for regular read/unread threads and forum sections) should have a little SSX star on them instead :thumb:

Should look like this:
preview.jpg
preview.jpg (79.44 KiB) Viewed 30151 times
[Edit 1]
I've noticed that when loading certain threads that I get a brief flash of another page before the next page loads in. Say I go from the General forum to the 2014 Game Releases thread. It flashes either a blank white page inbetween, or this:
weird.jpg
weird.jpg (99.34 KiB) Viewed 30149 times
Yet when loading others it's an extremely smooth transition from one page to the other.
This page flash is very, very quick so I had to record a video of it doing it in order to grab the above screenshot, though this one seems to appear far less. It's usually just white. What's strange is it doesn't do it on every thread. I thought it might be a general loading issue at first (since that's a pretty big thread), but it does it on the 2015 thread too which only has 13 posts so far, and the Overwatch thread which has just 3. I then tried it on the Dragon Age: Inquisition thread since I posted a ton of downsampled png's in there, thinking if anything would take a hit on the loading it would be that thread, but nope. What these other threads do have in common though are YouTube vids so I'm thinking this might be the cause?, not sure. Maybe trying to call the YouTube vids before the actual thread itself or something?. Thought it was worth a mention either way as I've never noticed it happening before :)

[Edit 2]
Yep. Just made a test topic in the archive with a single post and a single YouTube embed. (Over here). It's fast as I say but it does it every time.

[Edit 3]
Just for an additional test, I tried clicking the exact same threads in both IE and via my phone too. Smooth, fast and seamless transition with each. So, it seems to be YouTube embeds but also linked to Firefox as well somehow (though I don't have any other browsers installed to try those as well). I'm using the latest version if that helps (34.0.5). (Tried wiping my history and I have Adblock Plus set to disabled on our sites)

[Edit 4]
Made a second test topic in the archive (Testing 2). Clicking Testing 1 in Firefox (a single post with 1 YouTube embed) flashes the blank white page during the transition, whilst clicking Testing 2 in Firefox (a single post with 10 of the same YouTube vids embedded) flashes the blank white page but with the nav too (like in the above screenshot). So more vids for the thread to load = white page with nav, and if there are only a few you'll just see white.


Hope those tests help narrow down the problem!. Feel free to delete the test topics from the archive if/when it is fixed btw, I'll leave them there for now so you can use them for testing too. I'm pretty sure that I was using the same version of Firefox before the new site was launched and I never noticed this happening on the old board :)
Just tried disabling all of my Firefox add-ons too, just to see if one of those were causing it. Nope.
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Re: Website Redesign Launched

PostPosted: Mon Jan 05, 2015 10:55 am

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M.Steiner
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I've made a lot of edits to my post above between last night and again this morning so just flagging the thread as "unread" incase you saw that post before I started adding shit lol. I spotted an issue last night and after a bit of testing I seem to have narrowed it down to be related to Firefox & YouTube embeds somehow. See above for more info :thumb:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Re: Website Redesign Launched

PostPosted: Tue Jan 06, 2015 9:02 pm

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Anubis
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Hmmm, that is an interesting find. Yes, fully replicable here too. Do you get that when using the main site, looking at news posts that have YouTube embeds in them MS?

Might be something to do with how the forum delivers the stylesheets now...I'll look into it over the next few days, but it might be weekend before I can put a fix together.

Thanks for the report!
"Perhaps this is what I have always wished for since that day. The loss and destruction of all. That's right, one must destroy before creating. In that case, if my conscience becomes a hindrance to me, then I will simply erase it. I have no other choice but to move forward....therefore!" - Lelouch vi Britannia/Zero, Code Geass: Hangyaku no Lelouch

Forever an eXile and proud of it!

Re: Website Redesign Launched

PostPosted: Tue Jan 06, 2015 9:16 pm

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M.Steiner
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Anubis wrote:Do you get that when using the main site, looking at news posts that have YouTube embeds in them MS?
Hadn't thought to try that!
Just tried clicking the "Our latest YouTube offerings!" and "Shattered Star in Driveclub" posts on the main site and both of those seem to load up just fine mate. Only seems to be affecting the forums.
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Re: Website Redesign Launched

PostPosted: Sat Jan 17, 2015 2:03 am

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M.Steiner
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character.jpg
character.jpg (30.47 KiB) Viewed 30007 times
Main site is having trouble displaying certain characters.
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Re: Website Redesign Launched

PostPosted: Sat Jan 17, 2015 9:16 am

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BlackDove
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Not on my screen.

Your browser/system has a problem with displaying certain characters.

Re: Website Redesign Launched

PostPosted: Sat Jan 17, 2015 10:07 am

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M.Steiner
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Hmm. Well, the forum thread displays fine for me within the same browser, just not the main page? Same on my phone (which I'm posting from now).
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Re: Website Redesign Launched

PostPosted: Sat Jan 17, 2015 10:17 am

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BlackDove
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Don't know, for me it's fine on all pages.

Re: Website Redesign Launched

PostPosted: Sat Jan 17, 2015 1:03 pm

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M.Steiner
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Done another test:

I post the news as this. It looks fine:
1.jpg
1.jpg (54.6 KiB) Viewed 29979 times
It appears on the main site like:
2.jpg
2.jpg (107.22 KiB) Viewed 29979 times
Then if I go back to edit the post I just made:
3.jpg
3.jpg (45.33 KiB) Viewed 29979 times
annnd if I post exactly the same on the forum like so:
M.Steiner wrote:Character test
Kara no Kyókai
òóôõöōŏő

Will delete in a sec.
It appears fine too:
4.jpg
4.jpg (45.44 KiB) Viewed 29979 times

[Edit: Just tried the main site on my brothers iPhone and the ó in Kyókai displays as a □ (rather than the � as pictured above). So it looks like Ky□kai.
So it's not just me.]
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Re: Website Redesign Launched

PostPosted: Sat Jan 17, 2015 8:15 pm

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Anubis
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Ahhh, yep. That's a cross browser character encoding issue. I see the issue in Chrome here. That sucks!

I'm kind of swamped with RL stuff at the moment, which is why I haven't fixed the YouTube issue either yet, but I'll look at this as soon as I can. Should not be a big one to resolve :)

Thanks for the heads up!
"Perhaps this is what I have always wished for since that day. The loss and destruction of all. That's right, one must destroy before creating. In that case, if my conscience becomes a hindrance to me, then I will simply erase it. I have no other choice but to move forward....therefore!" - Lelouch vi Britannia/Zero, Code Geass: Hangyaku no Lelouch

Forever an eXile and proud of it!

Re: Website Redesign Launched

PostPosted: Sun Jan 18, 2015 12:52 am

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BlackDove
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Any way you can force .webm's to repeat forever?

Re: Website Redesign Launched

PostPosted: Sun Jan 18, 2015 1:41 pm

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Anubis
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BlackDove wrote:Any way you can force .webm's to repeat forever?
Yeah, that's fairly easy I think. I'll test it locally when I'm fixing the other stuff and let you know :)
"Perhaps this is what I have always wished for since that day. The loss and destruction of all. That's right, one must destroy before creating. In that case, if my conscience becomes a hindrance to me, then I will simply erase it. I have no other choice but to move forward....therefore!" - Lelouch vi Britannia/Zero, Code Geass: Hangyaku no Lelouch

Forever an eXile and proud of it!

Re: Website Redesign Launched

PostPosted: Mon Jan 26, 2015 10:50 am

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M.Steiner
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Another issue to add to the list.

Code: Select all

[center][/center]
Doesn't do shit.
Testing testing testing
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Re: Website Redesign Launched

PostPosted: Mon Jan 26, 2015 7:13 pm

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BlackDove
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Anubis wrote:
BlackDove wrote:Any way you can force .webm's to repeat forever?
Yeah, that's fairly easy I think. I'll test it locally when I'm fixing the other stuff and let you know :)
If it's so <censored> easy, why haven't you done it already <censored>.

Re: Website Redesign Launched

PostPosted: Mon Feb 09, 2015 3:24 pm

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M.Steiner
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Any update? :)
  • White page / site nav appearing when loading threads which includes YouTube vids.
  • Character encoding issue on the main site for some browsers (Kara no Kyókai etc).
  • Forum code for "center" does not work.
  • and repeating .webm's as requested by BD.
to add to:
Anubis wrote:Issues to be looked at
  • Modifying new lightbox system so that when expanded images are clicked, their full sized variants open in a new tab - to allow users with smaller screens to see the full images. BlackDove
  • EVE Killboard styling fixes. Anubis
  • 404 issue from legacy URLs. Anubis
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

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