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Friday Jun 29, 2007

New frock!

The observant among you, and everyone else reading this on the homepage, may realise we've had another play with our front end. We're hoping that the homepage will get across just how much content we have on TheSite.org, and help highlight some of the spanking new content we've got for you.

The most obvious change is the new highlights box - which is a return to the way we used to present new, important, fun or fabulous content. We've got a bank of about 20 articles and three are randomly pulled out every time you visit the page. However, if you're dying to see everything we've highlighted then you can visit the following page to see everything -

http://www.thesite.org/view?=highlights

Other changes include the RSS feeds for each of the six main sections - these pull out the three newest articles for each section and replace the text descriptions of the content areas. To be honest, see the same description on the homepage for a couple of years had started to get pretty old, and directly linking to articles seemed to reflect the depth of our content between than we ever could with a couple of static lines.

If you're craving even more RSS updates do have a look at our Pick and mix page. It's a complete breakdown of all our feeds including our blog, new content, podcasts and new threads on the discussion board.

We've also made some changes to the right hand side of all of our pages, what we call the bolt-ons. Most of the changes put people here to sleep, let alone a punter, so I won't bore you with it - needless to say the biggest change is that the Need help now? box no longer looks like a 1970's railcard.

And the blog is the last big change we've made, bringing it onto the homepage to make it easier to get to, and provide you with easy access to what's new and fun at TheSite.org towers.

So hope you like it, feel free to comment here and tell us what you think, or head over to the thread about the refit. If you want to check out how it looked before (the best design is always about subtle changes...) then check out the Google cache. 

And if you really, really want to know all the changes we've made then check out the full development documentation for the homepage revision.

Well. that's that, another redesign finished. Now time to get started on the next one

Posted by Jim ( 4:08 PM ) Link to this post  |  Comments[0]

Wednesday Jun 06, 2007

Vox pops on the boards

We're trying out a new way of vox popping on TheSite.org. Now it's not that I don't like going up and down the streets in all weathers armed with a digital recorder, camera and notepad. In fact we're still very keen to get out and about, especially to events that affect young people. The reason for this new way of vox popping is to make sure we represent more than our local Londoners.

So if you check out the 'We need you' thread on the boards, you'll find the new vox pop thread. There's going to be no set limit over how long we keep the question running, but here's me hoping that within two weeks we will get at least ten good responses.

We've kicked it all off with the question: 'What was your first job?' Mine was working in a dog kennel for an eight-hour shift for £12 a day. It consisted of cleaning up a ridiculous amount of dog shit and walking around 20 dogs a day, "including two St. Bernard Matthew dogs", I remarked to someone other day when I asked them about their first job. The response was a lot of laughter. Ooops. St Bernards, St Bernard Matthews, whatever! In any case, it wasn't the best job in the world, but I did get a lovely tan in the summer months I worked there!

 

Posted by Julia ( 2:34 PM ) Link to this post  |  Comments[3]