It may be a weekend, but it’s a perfect time to launch our brand new look and a brand new section. Fellow readers, say goodbye to the blue circles and Exogenesis, and say hello to our brand new, cleaner Lights and the new section called the Newsroom. And, of course, it would be rude of me to not introduce the theme to you.
Wait? What’s “Lights”?
If you have been fellow readers of ours over the pasat few years, you will notice that we have a habit of naming our designs. In fact, it has been a habit of ours (well, mine – since I coded the designs) since we introduced Crystalline. Since then, other names we have used were Flux, Bitstream and Exogenesis.
But why Lights? Well, following on from the tradition established by Exogenesis – we name it after a song (so, take that WordPress with your projects named after Jazz musicians). For those who want to know, Exogenesis was a song from Muse, and this time – Lights is a song from Ellie Goulding.
It’s a weird tradition, but it’s a fun tradition.
Bigger and Clearer
Yes, the first thing you will notice is that everything gets bigger. The navigation, sidebar text, and even this has been bumped up a notch. The font size and line spacing has been increased in order to improve readability. The theme has also been designed to make it easier to navigate our content without much hassle. So that is why we have eliminated the drop-down menu, added a “quote box” which rotates a bunch of quotes we have selected – and will change – and also finding the “Latest” and “Popular” stories on our site.
In addition, you can now find where we are and what services we use. Our new “techgeek.com.au Everywhere” highlights where you can follow us – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. We soon hope to get into other social networking sites to post content, as we want to be there keeping you up to date with tech news, reviews and tips no matter what service you are. We’re are not biased.
Search has now been pushed to the top of the header and made more prominent. It’s bigger, and ready to be used. So go ahead, try it.
Changes Under the Hood
Our theme was built on WordPress 3, but now with radical revisions keep popping up, our theme wasn’t that flexible. New things such as Post Types were something we wanted to implement and our theme wasn’t up to that – so we decided to radically overhaul our design in order to be more flexible to new things WordPress is adding.
Just to note, we haven’t added Post Types yet. We’re still looking at ways how to implement this, but expect this to change.
And the changes included reducing the amount of images we used for stylistic purposes. We have managed to squeeze them into one big image called a “sprite” – where there are multiple images in one, but we usually manoeuvre the image to fit where it is supposed to be. In addition, most of the presentation is done by good old CSS – the new navigation is all CSS.
Also, we have dumped support for IE6 and some of the features might not work in IE7. In other words, we partially support IE7, and dump IE6. We highly suggest you upgrade to a more modern browser such as Internet Explorer 9, Firefox, Safari, Chrome or even Opera. Just move away from those two browsers.
Introducing the “Newsroom”
With Exogenesis, we had over 20 different sections of the site, and some of the sections were neglected as, well, popular sections such as Gadgetlyst, Pwnage and Cupertino Loop took much of our focus. Now, we have combined several different sections – including Security and Digtial Media – in order to create the “Newsroom”.
Newsroom is the place for analysis of the tech stories, opinions and reports from our editors. The main idea for the Newsroom is to spark intrigue and debate, in addition to be as flexible as possible for our editors in order to contribute to tech news without worrying over which section should it posted it to. Newsroom is also a weird section in that news stories from Gadgetlyst, Pwnage and Cupertino Loop will also populate the feed so that you don’t miss out on the stories happening on those sections.
So, welcome to the very first post on the Newsroom.
We want Feedback
What makes techgeek.com.au so brilliant is you, our readers. So please give us feedback on the design, constructive criticism, what you want on the design to be added or even what you don’t like about the design. So comment away, send us tweets over at @techgeekcomau or even on Facebook – you can find the links on “techgeek.com.au Everywhere”.
And now, I bid aideu.