Just out of curiosity, has there been any discussion about making Sitepoint look & feel like it used to? I couldn’t remember if anyone ever mentioned it or not (sorry if this is a sore subject / old topic).
Ah, the good ole days…
[font=verdana]This might sound like a silly question, but why do you think we moved away from that design?
Any website design has a limited shelf-life. Design moves on. What was state of the art in 2005 now looks, well, like it is from 2005 … and in web terms, 7 years is ancient, practically prehistoric. We have had a number of redesigns since then, and while they haven’t always been to everyone’s tastes, most people have liked the changes we’ve made, and even those people who started out by not liking them very quickly adapted and I bet now can’t even remember what it was they preferred about the previous design.[/font]
Bah! Go the whole way back. Go HTMLDog!
Or even better!
I can understand fresher designs, increased functionality, etc. but (and I’m typing this with as much sensitivity and respect as is possible with text) I miss the old design. I think it looks nicer… I hate being honest about that because I know everyone at SP likely works hard on what they have now, but seriously, the older design I linked to above just seemed to be more effective and conveying a more professional look & feel. Hey, if I’m alone on this, I’ll shut up about it. Just wondered if this had come up lately is all.
I think the company is pretty sure of where it’s going with design, whether or not we like it. I guess it reflects the kind of company it is changing into, with a lot of niche sites with blog content and so on. I like the way the forum posts were integrated with the SP home page in the olde days. Personally, I would also make a bigger effort to feature the books on the SP home page. But then, I have no expertise in marketing, so who am I to speak?
It’s not stopped me from visiting the site and I’m sure they have reasons for doing what they’re doing. I just miss the old design… It was a bit more fluid, ya know? More continuous or aesthetically connected–if that makes any sense.
Ha… They should get a dream team to donate some time or something to give this site a facelift. God knows the talent visits this site that’s capable of doing it because I was mostly speaking about the visuals here more than integrated this or functional that… Might be a completely different story on the back-end.
I guess you could set up your own user style sheet and reorder things a bit in the mean time. 
Yeah, I thought about doing that. Might do that over x-mas break.
Never hate being honest or be afraid to express your own opinion as long as you do it with respect (and respect other opinions, of course).
I’m with you that I liked the old design better but I got used to the new one. I do understand that although HQ have moved a bit further to give us more freedom (one of the major complaints was the amount of publicity they did for their own products), they still want to keep the same model and feeling among their group of sites… and hence that they redesign the forum to keep consistency with their main page.
Now, I’m used to this one, and design changes are a pain in the neck. It has take us a lot of work (I do have to thank the rest of the forum staff for this, my input haven’t been much and I have not made myself very usefull in this process) to fix little glitches and CSS errors, plus to make it more usable and improve the looks. But I guess that we’re not going back and I guess that’s a good thing. We hope that the future [design], when it comes, will be better 
Like 99% of all users, I dislike change, especially change that seems to exist solely so that I have to learn a whole new way to do what I was doing efficiently before.
I’ve never understood why programmers and designers keep asking “why don’t users upgrade/update?” The answer just seems so obvious to me.
If it’s not broken, don’t fix it… Right? Unfortunately, most management bodies tend to want to be friends with the Joneses…
Well, one problem for me is, I do like security upgrades and bug fixes (bug fixes != feature requests).
One thing happening at SP forums was the aging vBull structure was crumbling under the weight of many hacks to an old system to make it do what current demands on it needed it to. Upgrading vBull almost forces a change in layout/design, really.
That’s quite true. This change in layout was forced by the upgrade of vBulletin. The number of resources taken by the old vBulletin was huge and the forum was going down once and again and we expected that with the new version things would improve.