Site Design Issues

Posted by Eric ⋅ 25 May 2009 ⋅ 6 Comments

So I was thinking about redoing the layout of Transbay Blog eventually. I had not planned on doing it so soon, but this weekend, things on the site went haywire. For a quick fix, I reloaded the site with this new theme, which is plain but functional. It will have to stay more or less like this for the time being. The sidebar is missing some features (the blogroll, among others), which will be fixed. I will also probably restore some sort of header image. In the meantime, if you have strong feelings about aspects of the old/new designs that you like or dislike, please feel free to leave a comment and I will take that into consideration when fixing up the new layout.

Discussion

6 thoughts on “Site Design Issues”

Have you considered the menu on the left?

Posted by jdfs | 25 May 2009, 10:18 am
With the old look, I always had to bump up the font size in my browser to read comfortably, so I’m quite happy with the new look.

Posted by Michal Migurski | 25 May 2009, 10:32 am
I like it– it’s less cluttered.

One comment (as a longtime, loyal reader). I find the typeface and spacing hard to read. It’s been this way for a while.

I think the new design makes this better, but I still find the lack of paragraph breaks hard to work with.

Keep up the great work– I’d love more long think pieces like the dream subway.

I have been fantasizing about major muni infrastructure planning for the next 10-15 years. Yes, the central subway, but then what.

1- Market Street railway had a post about a year ago imagining extending the california cable car out to Fillmore, or restoring it to Presidio.

2- Geary Light Rail. Let’s do it, immediately after the central subway.

what else?

Posted by shanan | 25 May 2009, 11:20 am
Thanks for the feedback. I wish folks had mentioned the typeface grief earlier! But better late than never, I suppose. Shanan, I’ll try to remember about paragraph breaks. (I always forget about those, both online and offline.)

Re: Geary light rail — and I do hate to do this, but we should also be realistic — but we aren’t going to see it in 10-15 years. There just isn’t the money, unless the feds decide they’re suddenly going to start funding the vast majority of capital projects. (Even BRT will take at least 5 years.) It seems pie in the sky at this point, but once we, as a region, confront the idea of building a second tube, Geary would be a natural place for it to end up. And Geary is such an important corridor, that it’s tempting to set our sight on that. It’s big planning and big spending, not to mention decades away. It’s also possible we wouldn’t get much further than some fixes South of Market.

A cable car extension to into Japantown, Fillmore, or Presidio, would be enchanting. IIRC Rick Laubscher from MSR mentioned there were significant ADA obstacles with cable car projects.

Posted by Eric | 25 May 2009, 11:43 am
Since you asked, I’ll second the comments about the small type and the lack of paragraph breaks. Honestly, I sometimes look at a big block of unbroken type with a smallish font, and I don’t even start reading (this applies to text on any website, not just yours). Laziness on my part, perhaps, but that’s the reality.

On a related note, I don’t know if you intentionally send out excerpts instead of full posts in your rss feed (in order to measure traffic more accurately, or something like that), but I read most blogs in Google Reader, and it’s slightly annoying to have to click through to your site to read the full post, especially when the typeface is smaller than it is my reader. If the topic of the post is something that I don’t care a lot about, then I often don’t end up clicking through to the full post, although I would probably read the whole thing if it showed up in its entirety in my reader. Again, some laziness on my part, but I’m probably not the only one.

All nitpicking aside, I really hope you decide to keep up the blog. Your hard work on it is very appreciated!

Posted by Dave C. | 25 May 2009, 12:52 pm
Dave: it is nice to get a better sense of traffic. Another thing was that the Examiner is in the habit of taking blog posts from RSS feeds and sticking an Examiner header on them, which makes them look like Examiner articles. They included a link, but abbreviating the RSS made that a bit more palatable. You aren’t the only one who has mentioned that, so… duly noted. Anyway, for now, I’m just kind of buying some time to think about what should happen with this site in the future.

Posted by Eric | 25 May 2009, 1:15 pm