A core value of wiki and AboutUs is change is cheap. Making changes is as fast as clicking edit, making your change, and saving. And because we easily can, we push changes to key wiki pages on our site often.
So unlike many websites, not only are we changing our site’s content all the time, but our developers are also pushing changes like bug fixes and feature improvements almost daily.
However, it’s rare for us to do a visual layout change. But yesterday we did and re-learned how cheap and fast change can be in a do-ocracy.
We brainstormed a simple change to scooch the content of AboutUs.org up a little to ditch some unused space, and during that very meeting Reid and Didip started pairing on it. A few hours later they pushed the changes live!
Here is the before and after:
Other design changes made just recently include some de-cluttering by removing the various ads and boxes from the right of pages (and moving the recent contributors/page views box into the top right of pages), removing categories (which were replaced by tags some time ago) from domain pages, and highlighting lists on domain pages.
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I like the new changes… But why haven’t you made the site “full screen”??
If you just put the “Sign up / login” button next to the search bar in the header then you could expand the page to “856px” allowing a larger space or the content. Then if a user is logged in the “Sign up / login” button could be replaced with an Ajax drop down user box.
This added to my suggested on – http://blog.aboutus.org/2009/09/08/lists-now-showing-on-domain-pages/ – would move the content up allowing more content to be seen “above the fold”.
How wonderful it is that nobody needs to wait a single moment before starting to improve the online world.
The new design is very clean and crisp – I like it so much!
Good job, guys!
can you tell me how an aboutus bot managed to find my home address and create a page on your site with this info, depsite my details being omitted from the WHOIS database?
Is there any particular reason you choose to violate the security and privacy of individuals?
thanks.
Hi twelve, we can look into that, if you tell us which is your site. We can also remove personal information if you like.
Michael, you’ve seen that we are now wider, yes?
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