Just a question for the regular Sumean's (those who visit every day to at least a few times a week). I'm curious as to what screen resolution you use when you're browsing.
Currently redesigning the site, and it's not suitable for any users using a resolution lower than 1280 x 1024. May have to do a skin for them instead.
I'm running dual monitors here at work, 1280x1024 on one screen and 1152x864 on the other. My browsing, email and documentation typically sits on the second monitor (1152x864).
at home I'm 1600x1200 single-screen.
I have no problem with 'annoying' when using smaller screens as long as it's usable. I used to occasionally hit sumea on an old 800x600 lappy and the sponsor's logos covered up the 'Forum' button on the front page's navbar which is the only actual unusable thing about that layout.
Yeh, I always thought people here would be using some huge screen sizes due to most of us primarily being programmers and artists. I know about the sponsor ads overlapping in smaller screen resolutions, and I just have everything fit so well with the new design but in a 1280x1024 or greater resolution. I guess I'll have to add some browser resolution detection script to bump to a lower browser resolution skin whenever 1024x768 and below folk visit.
If you do pick a minimum res it should at least be 4:3 IMO - 1024 x 768 min or 1280 x 960 - not 1280 x 1024 which gives users who are running a 4:3 mode a somewhat stretched picture.
This flows into commenting about artists art paticularly as anyones whose ever drawn a character in 1280 x 1024 then switches to a clean 4:3 mode realises their character is stretched [:O]
well that shocked me when i loaded it up just a second ago. It was normal today at work, and now it's al new and everything. took me a bit to find all the usual sections, but everything is still there, just moved around, which is cool. My only crit is the blue-on-blue 'jobs' and 'what's on' lists, the text is a bit hard to read. needs a little more contrast i think.
Overall i like it, even circus like logo! And the sponsors finally fit somewhere! hazah! (although the vote panel percentages are to far to the right and being obscured, though that could just be my resolution)
Yeh, that's probably the small interview I did with them about the industry.
Anyway, there's still a lot of work to do and there are some glitches here and there which will get ironed out eventually. Trying to get things to work on all browsers in CSS is such a pain. IE is incredibly stupid, and some bugs in Opera are beyond belief (the main page renders properly if you just refresh the page, which makes absolutely no sense). Apart from that, the CSS this time round is much less lamer. [;)]
With the dark blue on light grey that you mention (on Sponsor jobs and Whats on), Livewire, it should be pretty readable? The links that are already clicked should be light blue in colour, so it shouldn't be a problem if they can't be read, because those links are already visited.
The section pages are going through an overhaul too, and the idea is to make that area a whole new subsite called Sumea Creative which caters to members, their journals, creative news and jobs as was suggested before.
Also Redwyre is doing some funky stuff for the gallery, and I'll be making the member journals much better once I get everything else done.
1280 here. It's probably best to accomodate 1024x768, as that's the most popular size last I checked.