New website

[Andrew McHarg]

George, are you aware of how many screen resolutions there are now?  How do you optimise for 100%???

Yeah, I've got a pretty good idea, Andy. In fact, as I'm sure you know, the trend is for viewing on smaller devices so this is headed in the wrong direction. Goodness knows what it looks like on a mobile. Haven't even thought to go there! Generally, I'd recommend using the old site as a guide as it made much better use of space. For example, in the new site, the width of the LHS panel could be halved without any loss in function and give more room for the news stories or a panel to the RHS (like the old site) which means we can get quite a bit more info scanning horizontally. Font size in news story headings is too big and the double line spacing is unnecessary. Functionally everything seems good but a little bit of experimentation and fine tuning with the style sheets could make this a lot better and finish things off nicely

The new website is designed to work with mobile devices, the old one was not. If you looked at the old website on a mobile phone it tried to display the entire home page (all three columns) on the screen, which made the news difficult (or impossible) to read. The links were very small and difficult to click on; in short - it just didn't work. The new website automatically turns the website into one column (and correctly scales it to 100%), displaying the most appropriate modules from each of the two columns on top of each other. It also turns the whole navigation into a single drop menu, so it's considerably easier to find the content you want. Note: we are aware of an issue with accessing the website on some Samsung mobile devices and a fix for this is being worked on as we speak.

This new site is not making good use of screen space. We see about half the information we used to on the old site before you have to start scrolling and clicking. As result, for the casual / lazy viewer (like me) its likely you will miss things. For example I completely missed that there was an event in Kirkaldy yesterday and only discovered today when I scrolled down below permanent ad for the Scottish Championship. ...to late then.

Is there any chance we can squish things up a bit so we get a similar same amount of info on the screen as we used to?

I agree that the new website has a lot more white space than the old website, but this is by design. A criticism from users of the old website was that too much stuff was squashed into a small space and the navigation structure was difficult to understand. Fine, perhaps, if you are used to it and know where everything is. Certainly not useful (even off-putting) if you are a new visitor to the website and don't have a clue where everything is.

So the new design is simpler, but there is actually almost no change in terms of the content that's displayed on the home page, so I'm not sure what it is you saw on the home page of the old website that you can no longer find on the new (you also had to scroll down on the old website to find news articles beyond the stickies at the top)? The only things that were displayed on the home page of the old website that are no longer displayed on the home page of the new website: the module showing the top Giant Killers and the module showing the Sensory Board Donation fund. I don't imagine these are the things you were particularly concerned about seeing every time you visited the home page?