Bring back the Orange! Viva la 2002!

This would allow folks to read MF from our phones (he says, lightly plugging his own site that would love to have MF added to available news feeds…)

Thoughts?

For web developers: There is a known bug in the slide effect in Scriptaculous 1.6.5. As you might have guessed, it causes IE to crash. I fixed the problem on this site by switching to version 1.6.

And if people didn’t look hard enough for content before, I honestly doubt that they are going to muddle through all the links.

I’m at a loss there. Nothing has changed, the content is still the same size, located in the same place and the titles are still big, bold and black. Countless hours of user research shows that the vast majority of users don’t have trouble with understanding where the daily content is in a three column weblog style layout like the one here. If you look at the leading weblog news sites out there, they almost all have a variation of this layout.

And it may be worth mentioning, since launching the updated site, not only are our daily visits up on the home page (compared to this time last year) but I’ve seen more hits to a broader range of pages within the site. Exactly what we had wanted.

Congrats on all the years of Motoring Fun… I’m just afraid that I’ll get a neck cramp by looking slightly to the left so often….

Thanks but just to clarify, the main content area has always been on the left.

I still love the site, still love the content, and just about everything else… but that’s my two cents. :)

If everything on the web were multi-column, then a wider window would be okay. But, when you run into a site that doesn’t have columns, a wide window makes text content too hard to read as the lines are too long.

I guess I’m a net luddite, though. :)

Lots of –> next

etc

where next refers to slightly older.

The list of posts on eg page 3 of the archives will shift by one every time a new post is published, or when maybe when the day or week passes.

If the numbering could start from the beginning, then eg page 17 of the archives always has the same contaent. A date-based URL scheme would be better

WhiteRoof Radio bypassed the problem by bulk linking to archives by generic number,

but a more descriptive link text for the more topic specific posts on Motoringfile would be appropriate.

‘Unfortunately there’s no room. Otherwise we would have. However we’ll continue to evolve this little feature. ‘

** try mouseover title text if you’re really out of room.**

I would like more text above the fold, and less

—–>> continued ….

• ’05 JCW MINI Cooper Tuning Kit – is actually an ’04
• You have two links to: JCW Brake Kit

For individual articles, I think your format works very well. However for the home page, a lot of very prime real estate is occupied by infrequently used reference/archive link listings. The home page would work much better if the top of the page could be formatted for two columns of article summaries, with the archive stuff moved down underneath.

On the face of it I agree with you and have even looked in this kind of layout a few years back. However with the amount of emails and comments we get continuously asking about subjects we’ve already posted about, it’s obvious we need to keep links to larger, more important stories, at the top. Thus the MF Features section. Then you have the top 5 posts… again a very popular click-point for users. Finally we need to have certain space for our sponors that lies above the fold.

In an ideal world we’d be able to move in that direction. However there may be better solutions that work within our current frame-work.

But all that said this new wider layout does give us some freedom to try new things in the future. This is another reason for the recent change.

Finally, consider making external links open into new windows.

We would never degrade our users by taking away that control. Instead we allow our users to decide for themselves how to open external links using built tools in every web browser.

It’s cool that you have the “MINI Numbering System Cheat Sheet”, but you should add the model names to the categories at the top and footer as well (like you did with “R55 (Clubman)”.

Unfortunately there’s no room. Otherwise we would have. However we’ll continue to evolve this little feature.

The site used to have more color, namely orange, but now it’s almost completely black, white, and grey.

Web design circa 2002 vs circa 2006.

A lot of what is in the second and third columns could be put on a separate page, such as the “Archive” page. I rarely look at that stuff, myself. And I agree those columns should go away once you open an article.

Again we’re trying to introduce our newer users to some of this classic content. We get so many emails and comments every day asking questions about content we’ve already posted. This is a way to subtly remind users about MotoringFile’s huge content archives

The site used to have more color, namely orange, but now it’s almost completely black, white, and grey.

It’s cool that you have the “MINI Numbering System Cheat Sheet”, but you should add the model names to the categories at the top and footer as well (like you did with “R55 (Clubman)”.

Finally, consider making external links open into new windows.

When is WordPress going to allow one to preview comments before submitting them?