The Fresh Loaf refresh
I've mentioned before that for the past few months I've been working on an upgraded version of this site. It is getting close to ready. Ready enough that if anyone wants to see it, you can.
The preview version of the new site lives at: https://refresh.thefreshloaf.com/
To get past the initial username and password, you'll need to use "freshloaf" and "refresh". This is there to keep Google and other bots from crawling it. It's not ready for them yet.
The preview site is not sending emails and your email address has been scrambled. You can log in if you remember your existing TFL username and password, but if you try to send a password reset email or create a new account, you will not receive the email needed to move forward.
The preview site will get blown away. What you see there was created from a clone of this site's database from a couple of days ago. Anyone is welcome to sign in and post content, but I'll be wiping out everything that has been imported there again soon, likely over the weekend again, as I continue working on the process of migrating the content from the existing site to the new site.
Dorota wrote up more details about the new site here.
It's a work in progress, for sure, but it is getting close enough to be viable soon, I think. I'm intending to try switching this site over to it in a month or so but that depends on me finding the time to continue making fixes and adjustments.
Let me know what you think! I'm sure it'll take some getting used to but I hope it'll still be comfortable and familiar. And hopefully easier to use, particular on phones.
Comments
Hi Floyd,
Laptop user. Only commenting on the home and blogs pages here...
It might be more appealing to the eye than just the current "laundry list" of entries for both comments and posts but, for example, each entry is now taking up four or five lines on my screen rather than the current one single line. Visual appeal is certainly a plus, but facility of use and scrollability, to me, is significantly more important than eye candy.
In the blogs section, there is no list of 10 recent entries to choose from, only the series of expanded entries themselves, making it infinitely harder to review at a glance, pick, choose and return to.
If the goal is merely the look of the home page, then yes. If the goal is to enhance usability, I'm not seeing it and it is a sharp turn backward.
Alan
Thanks for the feedback.
So far visual appeal has been pretty low on my list of priorities. Familiarity, yes, and ease of use, particularly on mobile devices, which yesterday made up 68% of the site's traffic (plus 3 percent on tablet).
The new homepage is deliberately looser and contains more white space, mostly because that works much better on mobile devices than the dense, tight, information rich layouts that used to be favoured when most traffic came from desktops and laptops. I'm a Edward Tufte fan and loved creating the information dense layouts he advocated for, but that just doesn't work on most devices people use now.
Which blog section is so much harder to review? The homepage blog list? I think I'm showing 20 there at the moment rather than 10, but it is listing of titles similarly to the old site.
I'd like to get some of the photos associated with posts back on the homepage to give it a bit more visual appeal, but that has been much lower priority than getting all the content over and making sure the core site functionality works as expected.
I must have been using early morning toothpicks to keep my eyes open and didn't notice the long(er) list of blog entries, so that's that!
"An outstanding question is whether we would have more participation from people on mobile devices if the site wasn't so terrible to use on mobile devices?"
The world has changed since the site first went up and mobile use has exploded. In that regard, unless there can be two distinct versions of TFL - definitely not advocating nor asking to add to your workload, the clear answer should be to accommodate the visual for the majority of members/viewers. Right now, they are behind the 8 ball. And likely should have accommodations more geared toward them.
As an old mainframer, I still have one foot in the old-school and rarely rely on the mobile version (tablet excepted) of TFL. If this is where the future lies, then that format should be the priority.
Hi guys. Appreciate the work you're putting in to update the site, and it's great to see that all the important things will migrate. Will there be any customizability in how it displays? (Icons, tiles, lists, lists with content, etc.) Like Alan, I prefer to access this site from a larger screen than my phone and what I'm seeing is a lot of white space and large account pics with very little content per screen. Zooming out only helps grab a couple more items, but then the text starts getting small.
dw
Thanks for your feedback.
Yes, the homepage will be looser and have more whitespace. At this point, no, user customizations aren't on the list of pre-migration to-dos.
I realize many power users like you and Alfonso use laptops or desktops. Me too. Most of the site traffic though is on mobile now. It's difficult to find the right balance to provide the best experience on both. This site (waves hands at the current design) was built with very few accommodations for mobile devices. The general trend all over the web in the past 10 years has been towards looser designs with more whitespace. Fitting as much as you can "above the fold" (on the first screen) used the be the goal; now it is not unusual to see a lot less on a single screen and to have to scroll much more often than you used to. That isn't a bad experience for most people because most people are on their phones and used to scrolling with their thumbs.
An outstanding question is whether we would have more participation from people on mobile devices if the site wasn't so terrible to use on mobile devices? I suspect so, but that's just a hunch. But I'm hoping to make it easy enough / good enough on mobile that authoring a post or replying to a comment from your phone is not a difficult thing to do. It is now.