Monday, January 2nd, 2006
Ajaxian.com Redesigned for 2006
Category: Editorial
We never intended that our 3 am, quick-and-dirty, hacked-up website template would stay with us as long as it did. And so, we reveal our new look for 2006; we hope you like it. Of course, we realize you come for the content, but hopefully now good ol’ Ajaxian.com is a little easier on the eyes.
As we near the one-year anniversary of the Ajax meme, we’re amazed at how far Ajaxian techniques have penetrated into the world of web development. From small boutique design firms to large dysfunctional corporations, Ajax is truly everywhere. And my, how the world has changed. But don’t worry, we’ll spare you another “Web 2.0, everything is new again” editorial.
Instead, we just want to express our profound excitement for the future of Ajax, and we want to thank you, our readers, for submitting so many interesting stories and for all of the great comments (especially the various “Ajaxian sucks!” posts).
This new redesign is just the beginning of what we have cooking for 2006. So please, keep us on your daily read list, give the podcast a listen, leave the confines of your RSS reader and visit the site every now and then, and as always, send in your feedback and story submissions to us at ajaxians [at] ajaxian [dot] com.
Happy New Year!
The Ajaxian Crew
I am constantly checking this site for Ajax news / Happenings and I’m happy to see it going forward.
This design is much better, congrats and happy new year.
Sweet design :) it also has my name highlighted ;)
Wow! That’s a beautiful design!
Congrats, guys.
It looks good; if I had one criticism, it would be to drop the gratuitous rounded corners on the right column; it doesn’t seem to fit in with the straight edges you’ve got (almost) everywhere else.
I don’t recognize it. That’s how good the re-design is.
Did the redesign kill some of the existing comments, or was mine just special? ;-)
Definitely a huge improvement…
A little noisier, might want to check the contrast in the footer, and the Patterns link in the main nav should have something warning you that it takes you elsewhere (as opposed to filtering news posts like I thought it would).
But definitely a nicer design by far!
Good… design.
looks great, definitely easier for the eyes …
Incredible! I absolutely love it! I’ve actually been hoping for this site to be redesigned, as I wasn’t very fond of the previous design, but this new design is what I hoped for and so much more. Thanks, guys, you really did a superb job!!
I was just about to offer some help concerning the previous design…
No really, I’m not that arrogant. Happy New Year! Love it.
Great Job, really looks good, interface sets things off really nice, love the colors good choice.
Happy New Year!
- Just another daily user!
Looks fantastic! Great color choices, better organization, and I am happy to see you guys follow Web standards. You are true professionals in every sense of the word. Looking forward to more podcasts and topic entries; keep up the great work!
much much better. nice work.
Looks great guys. I just hit reload and hey presto - new look! What can I say - looks FLASHY! - oh the irony. Keep up the good work…
Nom.
It looks really good. You are providing information about great stuff
Hooo! Thanks for this great new design guys!
When in the middle of a column of comments, I have trouble telling which comment is associated with which commenter, if you know what I mean. Other than that, lovely!
Wow, this is awesome. Love the color scheme and the gradients.
Ajaxian redesigned (and finally on Wordpress)
Yay! We finally got Ajaxian updated with a new design and converted to Wordpress from Movable Type. The redesign is great and long over due, but even more important to me is to not have to deal with the horrible Movable Type admin interface. After …
Hey, ajaxian allows trackbacks now, too. Now we better get some anti-spam plugins in quick! =)
I’m not a designer, but I know what I like, and this is it! I really like the curves on the search box, and placing the rss icon in the main navigation is just genius.
One thing I’ve hoped for over the last year was that Ajaxian.com would “eat dog food” by publishing from an Ajax-based blogging system. Wordpress is definitely on its way to becoming just that system.
Oh - another thing. When Ajaxian.com first appeared on the map, I thought “another bandwagon afficionado”, but you’ve proved me very wrong! This site’s feed is one of the first that I add to my rss readers when I set up a new machine.
Well done on proving fantastic coverage of all things bleeding-edged, and I look forward to more of the same!
Kae
ps: Look, ma, I’m on Ajaxian!
Great improvement of the layout, good work!
As said above from others, the contrast in the footer needs a check, and maybe this comment input form also, looks a little strange. But these are the pains of a new layout everybody has to live with ;)
Very nice!!! This is definitely a huge improvement. It looks very classy. Finally a look that matches the excellent content of this site.
Well done!
p.s.: did you guys ever get my mail on a new ajax item?
Looks really fantastic guys!
Very sweet design m8’s
Fabulous ! It is a pure creation or a bought template?
Way better !
Cheers and happy new year !
Wonderful job guys! A definite improvement over the previous look and feel…I look forward to even more great things to come from this site!
I love the visuals, try using PHPTAL to render valid pages.
Very nice, guys! I just found out about the site a few weeks ago and I’ve been subscribed to your feed ever since. Keep up the great work!
Folks,
Thanks for all your very kind comments. And not one “It sucks!” Of course, our old design was so bad to begin with, I guess anything would have been an improvement.
Let me address some questions:
Contrast levels: We’ll take a look. I made the mistake of spending most of my time reviewing the design on a Mac. We tested the site on PCs, of course, but didn’t really look at the levels. Will do.
Comments blending together: We agree. We’ll do something about that.
Curves versus straight lines: My fault. I asked for the site design to be made a little more curvy… maybe we took it too far on the right-hand side.
Template vs. creation: It was created for us from scratch.
Lost comments: We didn’t intentionally delete any content; we’ll look into that.
Thanks again for taking the time to share your thoughts.
Ben
Oh my stars and garters! I enjoyed the content of ajaxian.com, but despised how it looked. You guys finally got rid of that horrid gray background that made the text so difficult to read. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Many times over thank you.
impressive design, congrats!!!
Very IconBuffet.com, but cool. A welcome change.
Color scheme is nice but fixed-width three-column layout definetely sucks (hey, you have asked for comments, haven’t you?) I would prefer both side columns combined in one, content column made wider and having overall layout fluid with fixed minwidth.
When fonts are enlarged, the main menu slids under the right column. The height of the top bar is not resized together with header text.
Captcha think seems broken. Oh, and double submit detection scheme sucks big time.
Michael J.: We’re pretty sold on the three-column layout, but we’re in the process of converting the center column to a fluid layout. Only so much we could tackle before the launch. :-)
RE: fonts. Thanks for the feedback, I hadn’t noticed this.
RE: captcha. I’ll double-check. We’re using SK2, the excellent spam detector for WordPress. It won’t display a captcha unless it doesn’t like you.
Thanks for the feedback, my friend.
Ben, thanks for not taking the S word personally :) Actually I quite like the new design. I am fond of red/orange/yellow colors, I am not a designer myself but I know what I like. IconBuffet looks very similar indeed, so I won’t feel guilty when I steal your color scheme :)
About captcha: when I tried to submit my first post (Firefox, Javascript is forbidden), I was presented with very basic text-only HTML form telling me to enter captcha key, but there was no image. I hit Back and resubmitted, this time there was no captcha question, but I was told that my comment was about to be submitted twice. So I opened another browser and posted from there what turned out to be a repost (thanks for deleting it).
Three-column: I understand that you want to separate “Links” section from “Ads” section and put as much as possible to the top so people could see it. It is just hard for me to see so much space being lost in the bottom of these columns. I guess I am used to small screens, so I prefer content to be as dense as possible. With current layout and proportions, fluid middle column would make sense on monitors with 1024 or higher horisontal resolution, but won’t help much for smaller screens. Well, I’ll keep my browser window maximized :)
So much better! Good Job!
“Contrast levels: We’ll take a look. I made the mistake of spending most of my time reviewing the design on a Mac. We tested the site on PCs, of course, but didn’t really look at the levels. Will do.”
I actually wrote that (after seeing it) from a Mac.
A very old iMac CRT, but a Mac. I didn’t even think of the difficulty of reading from a Windows box…
Reading it now at work on a newer one with a decent monitor it looks fine, but would still blend in a bit much for those with bad eyesight.
look very nice, good job!
Fantastic job. I usually browse via Bloglines anyway, but from what I remember of the old layout, this is a vast improvement. Keep it up.
Michael J: Thanks for the follow-up. Actually, we have something different planned for the columns than what is there presently. Otherwise, I’d agree with your take on ‘em. :-)
I was really used to the previous design, as I read Ajaxian every two hours =P. Well done!
Wow i really like the new design! Happy new Year to you too!
Great redesign! Really cool !
[...] To commemorate the advent of 2006, Ajaxian, your one-stop shop for all things AJAX has launched a new look. It's quite spiffy and a marked improvement on their old design, so head on over and give it a gander. [...]
Nice, very nice. I have Ajaxian in my rss reader, so I didn’t realise until I got to read the entry. I guess the title gives it away a bit…
As people said before, the listed comments can be a bit confusing, but I’m sure you’ll work it out. All the best for 2006!
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