Welcome to SEGAbits Model 5, the new look for our blog! Our web designer has been hard at work coming up with a new look that modernizes the blog with a more responsive layout, making it easier to access our featured content. Unlike most blogs, we decided to go custom instead of just buying a pre-made skin, wanting to give the site a unique feeling. I hope you guys enjoy navigating through our content and news that we all worked hard on putting together.
So tell us in the comments what you think about the site and any features you want implemented. We are working on adding more things to the new look as time goes on, especially next year when we will be having some really exiting new content. It should be a great ride! Welcome to the next level!
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Allow me to be the first to offer my congratulations on the new design. I know something like this isn’t easy to pull off. I regret that I can’t be with you in person to celebrate; however, since most (all?) of us are in different locations, this is, naturally, impossible. I do wish to express my best wishes to you for today, tomorrow, and beyond.
Thank you. Um, I’m not sure if you saw it when we had some incorrect values entered for the categories queried. I was fixing something else and uploaded the wrong file. It’s fixed now though! So it looks even better now if you saw it when things weren’t right.
Basically when it was messed up you couldn’t see our big feature image on the home page and the featured bar was showing the wrong articles.
Also, yes. I’m definitely celebrating! I was working on this theme like crazy this week. A lot of work.
Excellent work, Will! SEGAbits is the slickest looking sega fan site on the Internet now!
Looks great! Good job!
Woah! Fantastic, I was a little stunned as soon as I opened the home page, since are a couple of days that I didn’t use the PC, but … congratulations, relly a great job, both from the point of view graphic that the organization of the various sections ^_^
Nice!
Unfortunately, something must’ve been accidentally changed as it now seems that the articles in your RSS feed are truncated. Please look into this.
The RSS Feed has been truncated since we fixed it before the new design went live. Which was about two weeks ago.
I’ll discuss this issue over with Barry/George and see if they think the RSS feed should show full articles, if they give the okay, then it’ll be another thing I add to my segabits to-do list.
Thank you for the feedback.
Holy crap. Now this is a surprise. Amazing stuff Will
It looks real sleek! I like it, great job on the site!
It’s a great design. With a website like SEGAbits, given the amount of content available, it’s easy to end up with a design that is too “busy”. Instead, you went with a more minimalistic design with soft colors, and the result looks fantastic. This puts it well ahead of any other Sega fansite I’ve seen. Out of curiosity, Will, did you use Bones or another starters theme? I ended up using Twenty Twelve for Segalization since I had little experience using PHP or WordPress at the time, but I plan to use Bones if I get around to starting things from scratch.
I used roots.io starter theme. http://roots.io/starter-theme/
It helped speed up the development a lot. It’s quite different from other starter themes from the way it functions. It certainly takes getting used to. It is really nice though once you get used to it. Originally I was trying to build the theme from scratch based on Foundation Framework, and it was just taking too long. When building from scratch there is so many different settings and files you have to worry about. It’s a very minimalistic starter theme, it’s just that, a starter theme. It’s not going to determine your design. You can change everything about it.
Also, thank you for the compliment =)
Thanks, I’ll definitely look into that if I get around to creating a new theme for Segalization!
No problem. If you ever feel like you need help feel free to send me a PM on the forums. I can’t and won’t build the whole theme for you of course, but I can help with small issues that might have you stumped.
If you don’t know PHP I’d suggest learning it. It’s a big help knowing even just the basics when making a wordpress theme.
It’s so pretty!
Looks great Will, Well done!
I love how the featured images turn orange upon hovering. Sophisticated.
Though I am curios why you opted to not go with a carousel instead of a static featured image?
Design decision. A rotating image carousel would be more bandwidth heavy and possibly cause some performance issues on some not so powerful phones. We already load a lot of bandwidth heavy content. Every post has an image at the very least, and sometimes every post has a video. Our navbar is also powered by JavaScript, so adding a carousel, which would need to load a big image for each featured article, would be causing a lot of extra bandwidth usage, and on phones with slow internet you don’t want that. Also, a carousel would be extra JavaScript/jquery which would affect page performance and people on phones.
Ever been on a website that is laggy and slow? That’s because those websites are loaded with JavaScript/Jquery content/plugins. I wanted to avoid that and have a fast performing site.
Also, thanks for the compliment! =)
I recently built a website utilizing bootstrap with a Carousel… runs smoothly on my ruddy old tablet. Though it was a pretty austere website.
Thanks for sharing the insights 🙂
I have nothing against image carousels. They are nice. I was just talking in our case, we already have a JavaScript heavy navbar, sometimes have 4+ youtube videos all embedded into the same page, which all use JavaScript to load, and post a lot of bandwidth heavy images. In our case, it wasn’t a good fit for the new website design.
Nice, you should show me your site on Skype or link it here; would love to see it.
I can show it to you on Skype.
Given that I’ve not uploaded it, I am currently pursuing a degree in Digital Media, so I am learning web design.
A lot of fun, but really hard work.
Good luck! Yes, web design and development is quite hard work, but it’s also rewarding, and in my opinion, fun. If you like it, keep at it. There will be times where you just wanna slam your head into a wall though. CSS defies all logic (not really, but feels that way at times)
Looks great! Good job guys!