Thread: ASN's New Look & Feel...

Hi All,

As I'm sure you've all noticed, ASN has moved to it's new home, and the forum engine has been upgraded.You'll find numerous little tweaks and new features, and there are some more significant new additions too.

There is new social networking functionality (groups, discussions etc), an upgraded photo album system, improved 'friend' listing/contacts management, profile visitor messaging, more powerful private messaging. The bread and butter stuff of reading and writing threads has some tweaks too - and there's improved search functionality with support for 'tags'.

Have a look around, we're sure you'll discover some useful new toys The Nav Bar at the top of the page (where you'll find new community stuff and a Radio & TV player) and your user profile controls are a good place to start...

We'll be building on this new platform furhter in the coming weeks/months, so keep an eye out for the extras as they come, and as always, if there's anything you think we should consider adding, drop us a line.

Have fun...

ASN Admin Team

PS> We've tried our best to make this move & upgrade as transparent and smooth as possible; but we are aware of some minor and intermittent database issues which may result in the odd blank page; this will be resolved ASAP. If you encounter other problems with the site following the work, we'd be grateful if you would get in touch, either in the Forum Helpline Section, or by PM.

Not too sure about the look - appears to be a roughly skinned basic template design. I'm guessing there's more to be done on the appearance?

Looks alright to me

As long as it works!.

T

Originally Posted by ChriS3

Not too sure about the look - appears to be a roughly skinned basic template design. I'm guessing there's more to be done on the appearance?

Yes that is exactly what it is, we need input from you guys to help us to get the site looking as good as possible whilst still being as functional as possible.

All criticism welcome, good and bad.

Yeah have to agree with Chris, the look ATM is not pleasing on the eye tbh, only IMHO, but doesnt feel like ASN, the thanks, quote etc buttons maybe slight change in text colour, I also notice pages load a little slow aswell, as you say ongoing but just making you aware of the site & how its running, havnt had chance to check it all over yet but seems ok for now, work in progress so all new things are welcome I'm sure.

Another thing I notice is when actually submitting post, it takes little longer to actually post it up, used to be instant now sits there taking few secs to decide what to do, lol

Glad to see some movement in the right direction guys.

I re-did most of the buttons and in-built graphics for Olly last time we had a facelift. Unfortunately I don't have time to help anymore.

I could give it a bash. I'm a professional web and graphic designer. This pale blue is doing my head in, lol.

Is the whole thing styled with CSS or are there some sneaky in-line styles knocking around too?

I like the look, its minimalist and sleek

Originally Posted by SmoothAssault

This pale blue is doing my head in

...And now it's a lovely light grey, much better

Yup, much better with the grey. Blends in with the Quick Reply box now.

I made a start on a sweeeeeeeeet new site header at work. Would be good if a mod could PM me so I could get a high res version of the ASN logo off them. Don't worry, I make websites look good for a living, lol.

I'll post it tomorrow when I get it finished, take it or leave it... I had fun making it either way.

Originally Posted by SmoothAssault

I made a start on a sweeeeeeeeet new site header at work. Would be good if a mod could PM me so I could get a high res version of the ASN logo off them. Don't worry, I make websites look good for a living, lol.

I'll post it tomorrow when I get it finished, take it or leave it... I had fun making it either way.

I will get in contact with Rob for you mate, he would be the man to ask

I noticed the text inside the PM area reply button etc was a shade of lime green not grey as per mainstream site Quote buttons etc, quite like that colour tbh.

Is it just me or is it painfully slow?
Seems to take an age to dip in and out of different sections and when you press the back button, nothing happens, you have to press it twice.

That took longer to post than it did to type - about 30 seconds. Then 40 seconds to get back into here to type this....

No mate, you're correct, it is very slow.

Yep. We're aware that speed/responsiveness hasn't been up to scratch today, but traffic has been quite high and we've still been fine tuning the resources on the new box.

We're working on it at the moment and things will be up to speed soon...

Thanks guys,

Rob.

Fair play to all involved, nice to see some improvements underway

I know I for one never like change! But pretty soon will be used to the new look and won't even notice it.

I agree it's been slow today, its 0130 now and everyone must be in bed as I am racing through here!

i think it looks pretty good, i think its got something missing tho, a bit of red here and there! also google chrome says i need to download something to view the site however E explorer lets me straight on???

Originally Posted by yellowgti

also google chrome says i need to download something to view the site however E explorer lets me straight on???

I use Google Chrome too and it worked straight off

I used my normal browser and im fine
Good work, Maybe a bit more colour but im happy with it how it is.

It's fine, just one niggle -

I have to log-in again, after a period of inactivity.
I've always had my preferences set to remain logged in, even if I switch my system off, and don't power up for weeks.

That function's gone now, a bit tiresome having to log in constantly.

Okay here's my effort...

http://www.smoothassault.co.uk/AudiS...Header2009.jpg

Your browser will probably scale it down slightly, so let it load then click on it to magnify up to 1:1. Only took a couple of hours, if that... Hope you like it.

Whole thing is very easily doable with some basic CSS, and even the transparency can be done on the welcome message box using a IE PNG hack script.

Main header image would be set as the background image in a relatively positioned DIV and fixed to the centre of that DIV. Login/Welcome box sits in an absolutely positioned DIV, same for the ASN logo. I could knock this up for you and provide the HTML and accompanying CSS, or I could put the CSS all in line (although it is not best practice).

...right, back to some real work, lol...

That looks really good mate, definitely an improvement and helps give the rest of the page its fresh new look!

To Google Chrome users experiencing problems... Here's the fix:

http://www.mozilla.com/firefox

...Seriously though, I'll have a look at this later, but it's not at the top of the list just now. I WILL investigate though...

Siena - So long as you tick the 'Remember Me' box when you log-in, you should stay logged-in. The only thing short of hitting 'Log Out' which will cause you to have to log-in again is deleting the cookie off yor machine. If you have your browser set to clear temporary files on exit, or use particularly aggressive internet security software, this may be what's happening. We've made no changes on our side which should affect this - the only thing which is slightly related is that we've reduced idle timeout - but that just means your name disappears from the online list after a shorter period of inactivity. So long as the cookie is still there and valid, you should be returned to the online list - without physically logging-in again - immediately as you click your next link.

SmoothAssault - Great work! Thanks! I'll drop you a PM shortly, I'm using a PDA which is running out of RAM and connected wth one bar of GPRS at the moment. As soon as I'm in front of a proper computer with a proper connection I'll be in touch...

Thanks and regards,

Rob

Nice work Smooth, I'd only say maybe some more red/black/blue needed overall as AS is known for this combination, maybe the actual text is coloured this way, but nice work anyway.

So it isn't known for red and blue then?

Seems to be a back button issue aswell. Sometimes it takes a double back click to get to the page you were on previously. It hangs on a strange url - http://www.connect.facebook.com/extrn

mitch78 : the red and blue are most definitely our colours, and a discussion on the incorporation of the Audi-Sport.net logo with it's current colours was to be the content of my PM to SmoothAssault in the first instance.

ChriS3 : thanks for the heads-up, we'll get that resolved ASAP.

Regards,

Rob.

feels ok just prefer the old colour setup looked very good before imo

Originally Posted by mitch78

So it isn't known for red and blue then?

Just for you Mitch, edited to include blue, lol.

Originally Posted by ChriS3

Seems to be a back button issue aswell. Sometimes it takes a double back click to get to the page you were on previously. It hangs on a strange url - http://www.connect.facebook.com/extrn

I thought that was me, obviously wasnt, glad not only one experienced that.

the only gripe i have is the speed which hopefully will be sorted and the white border background get rid of that and were back to original

Originally Posted by SmoothAssault

Okay here's my effort...

http://www.smoothassault.co.uk/AudiS...Header2009.jpg

Thats awesome! Good work!

Thanks, just waiting for Rob to send me a PSD version of the logo and I'll be knocking up a new version. I was sent a nice high res JPEG but PSD would make things easier for me.

Got the logo from Rob last night and made a start incorporating it into the header. Also added some red and blue hue to the S4, R8 and S3 to cater for the comments about the colour scheme.

I'm in the office right now working on a few other sites, but when I get a chance I'll finish off the header.

How about this one...

http://www.smoothassault.co.uk/AudiS...ortHeader4.jpg

Looking good mate, I don't think it needs the red and blue wash over the cars now it has our colours in the form of the logo. I think it looked cleaner when they were 'natural'....

Cheers,

Rob.

Thy will be done...

http://www.smoothassault.co.uk/AudiS...ortHeader5.jpg

Great work bud!

I'll PM you about the logistics of the next bit...

Thanks again,

Rob.

I have used the new forum for a few days now, and generally I like it and have got used to it. One point which would make the site easier for me to use is this:

The "Tags" by each section, are a light grey when there are no new posts, and a darker grey when a new post has been made since your last visit. Personally I don't think that the dark grey of a new post stands out enough - did the old tags used to be red? I would prefer to see a more standout colour so it's instantly apparent which sections have new posts in.

Generally it's a top job, seems to be a bit quicker today too?

..and I was going to say exactly the same thing!

Originally Posted by Ming Blue

..and I was going to say exactly the same thing!

Great minds ....

We had a good giggle about this last night...

I was up in the clouds somewhere on Tuesday following our all-nighter doing the upgrade, and I received a text message from MB pointing the issue out - but being up in the clouds, I couldn't get my head around what I was looking at!

Anyway, a lot of the buttons are going to be tweaked or replaced to make them more appealing/easier to see and use. I'm just engrossed in another couple of issues which have a larger impact on user experience first, but keep your eyes peeled over the next few days...

Cheers,

Rob.

Good effort lads, looks cool now.

I'm glad something was finally done about the old box, but i have to say i'm not particularly impressed with the performance of the new one...

For starters, the box is in the states, meaning instead of 20ms round trip to a UK datacentre your looking at an average of 120.

There are no longer the random errors the previous machine was having, but it still feels sluggish. I'm not sure if this entirely due to its geographic location, or if there are load issues with the server itself though?

What are the servers load averages?
How does its Outstanding IO queues look?

How does everyone else find the speed of the site?

I must admit I find it painfully slow compared to the old site, am I unique in this?

We're aware that performance of the site is rather low (particularly at peak times as you would expect).

Geography is one factor, but not actually one which is so siginificant. At the end of the day, folks all over the world hit sites outside their own country/continent all the time, and that doesn't guarantee poor performance. While pings are of course slower than to that of a UK based machine, they've never been terrible as far as I've seen, and when they've been a little slow, it hasn't been terribly slow.

Now we've got the facilities to monitor the server and traffic more closely, we've had quite a surprise - all you four-rings fanatics are gobbling up quite a resource (and of course we're more than happy for that to be the case), and certainly more than we had previously thought.

We've suffered a few 'crashes' since the upgrade, and we tracked the cause to scripts running during peak periods 'pushing us over the edge' - that's been sorted, so reliability should be improved.

We're no longer seeing huge spikes in server load, but there are certainly quite steep curves at certain parts of the day. Connections were surpassing limits in the lunchtime rush, which is when we were suffering the most. That's been resolved now, so again, reliability should be improved, and performance should take a little lift too.

My spare 'tinkering time' has been taken up sorting out the email issues we've had, now that's resolved I'll have more time to continue investigation/resolution work on performance issues.

Thanks for your patience,

Rob.

Cool, emails are working great now, just as you say performance is tad slow, at least it works now which is a drastic improvement albeit slow at times but I'm sure this will improve as time goes on.

Thanks Rob.

The last couple of evenings this forum has been painfully slow, I know it's peak time etc but my other sites have been ok.

Is it just me?

No its slow tbh & has been since upgrade, but robs working on IIRC, had few database errors & thats usually also associated with the slowness aswell, would be nice to get it upto speed, but having used ED38 today thats unreal slow aswell so used to it now lol.