Ah!!! what is wrong with this tech-forums?! I hate this web face!!

[Peter.Cort]

it's more of a fun professional. I like this skin, lex you missed the christmas special, which all i'll say about it is it was interesting... It would be nice to be able to switch it to the older black skin or have the option to install your own skin

 

[MindoverMaster]

You know why we can't go back to the old black skin, Peter.

They were going to have a contest for member-made skins, but I guess that hasn't started yet.

 

[The Dark Knight]

I am brand new to this forum but I must say I love the new skin. It really does give the site a professional look. In comparison to other tech forums I have looked at this skin really does set it apart.

Congratulations to the admin and tech team for the new skin. : )

 

[MindoverMaster]

Baez is the one to be congratulated. He did this, IIRC, from raw, and alone.

 

[Baez]

i agree some stuff is hard to read / find. example is the new posts priv messages line. most of the links are standard though so once you find them, you should be able to repeat easily.

my beef is mainly with the load times. The new design is pretty. Its one of the nicer forums I've seen. However, I can't click-click-click anymore. its more click-wait-click-wait-etc. I think new skins may fix this though.

Really? I've always had to "click-wait" here. The server or bandwidth has never been very fast and according to Alexa, the average load time is 4.1 seconds, which 91% of sites are faster than it.

 

[Trotter]

According to FasterFox, this page loaded in 0.699s and the main forum page in 1.410s. I'm on a 8meg line (much faster down BTW) and a quad running Folding on three cores.

 

[remixedcat]

I think the top part is a little busy LOL... the rest of it's fine.

 

[office politics]

@Baez and @Trotter

now that i've posted my gripes with load times, i've analyzed it a bit more. These feelings are subjective. I haven't run numbers. But also every time i feel like im waiting longer than usual, i look in my status bar (IE) and it's always waiting to download a pic file. Hmm, i may or may not grab ss's. But then again this is one person's config on a small number of different computers; work, home, school. Also, I should double check with my schools config, but after leaving class i thought to myself that may have been faster than the other two.

edit - Also, i didn't use the Baez Black Theme very much because it didn't have the new posts, usercp links at the top. I switched my default over to the old blue and white theme. In my posting i'm comparing the current theme with the old blue and white.

it may be worthwhile to setup a thread with different configs and performance stats. This would help people understand how to make pages load very fast....but at what cost?

 

[Baez]

I used optimized web gifs when possible. Problem is in this day and age with everyone expecting more of graphics, png is usually a much better alternative, even if it can be 4+ times the file size.

 

[remixedcat]

I prefer PNG myself.