ExposureRoom - News - Brand New Look and Themes

Brand New Look and Themes	1votes
Posted by: Shiv Kumar	Views: 105 Favorited: 0 Comments: 1

June 14, 2008 04:48 PM	Filed Under: Enhancement Tags: Banner, ExposureRoom, Themes, Website Navigation

After the last poll (Website Navigation) we took a hard look at what members said, via the poll as well as discussions we had in the newsgroups and decided to give XR a whole new look by cleaning up the layout, navigation system and overall site design. The end result of this is a new main menu and the ability for you to choose you color theme as well as font and font size. (Discuss this post here)

The most prominent issues seem to be

Hard to read
Clutter

The following images attempt to show the difference between the current and the new in terms of clutter and readability. The "Original" theme here uses the Arial font at 90% (this is similar to the current theme) while the "Earth" theme uses Century Gothic and 100%.

This images shows the "Videos" page using the current theme. Lots of bright fonts. The font used here is Arial at 90%.

This image shows the "Videos" page using the new "Original" Theme. The font selected here is Arial at 90%

This image shows the "Videos" page using the new "Earth" theme. The font selected here is Century Gothic at 100%

We feel that these two issues are in fact related. Because things were hard to read, we started brightening up the font colors. This led to contention across information on a page where each piece of information got brighter to compensate. This in turn leads to the feeling of clutter as well as actually making it hard to read with all these tiny bright things hoping to grab your attention. So what we decided to do about these issues was to tone down the brightness of fonts quite a bit and clean up the layout.

This image shows the Current Home Page with the current theme, banner and tab menus

This image shows the Home page using the "Original" theme, the new banner, logo and main menus.

This image shows a member Asset Display Page using the current theme. You also need the XR banner at the top of the page.

This image shows a member Asset Display Page using the "Original" theme. The new banner, and logo can be seen as well.

This image shows a member Asset Display Page using the "Earth" theme. The new banner, and logo can be seen as well.

The core changes to the original theme are the following:

The colors have been toned down drastically.
All hyper links in the system now get a faint dotted underline. Faint enough to be noticed but not as stark as an underline would appear.
Hyper links now brighten up when you mouse over them.
The main site’s menus have change, or rather have been re-arranged so as to show only a few top level menus.
The main site no longer has tabs but rather the banner extends down a bit so that it can accommodate the main menus.

We also wanted you to have the option to change the font size to suit your preference. In order to allow for that we had to take a hard look at the page layout in many cases as well as build in the flexibility in our pages to allow user chosen font sizes to actually be reflected in all areas of the system. This meant that we had to clean up a lot of stuff behind the scenes. A side benefit to this cleanup effort is that you can now use the font sizing feature of your browsers to see things in bigger fonts if you need to, or use the zoom capability of your browser to see things zoomed in. In effect the new ExposureRoom website is more accessible.

As if that weren’t enough, we decided to re-arrange our main navigation system (Thanks to Joe Shaw). Essentially, we’ve re-arranged things a bit and we’ve done away with the tabs and replaced them with menus in the banner. We now have two banners as a result of this. You see one banner on XR pages and another banner on member Website Pages.

So what you get is the ability to choose between two primary themes (for now). We call these themes, “Original” and “Earth”. The Earth theme will be the default theme, meaning that new visitors will see this theme. Both visitors and members can choose a specific theme and from that point on, they’ll see ExposureRoom in that theme until they choose to change it. Within a theme, you can choose between fonts as well as well the font size. We think this will satisfy almost all members/visitors, and we really hope you like the new look.

This following images attempt to show the differences in "Data Entry" Pages across the various themes.