It is painfully slow, but worth waiting for

agreed scott, agreed.

“apologies for the burned retinas but so far you’re the only one who doesn’t like it.”

fair enough clive, there was a smiley on the end of my comment, honest. normally i use a black on white stylesheet for your site, but these past few days i am without such comforts, so i notice it more.

Curvy designs are getting a little… what’s the phrase, over-done? They can work really well, but I prefer square as well. Always have done for some reason. Having said that, viewed in Safari/Camino the buttons are automatically styled in that Apple-oval way. Might have to force the square issue as they don’t go with the angled design.

*Oh, and the comment box is now at the bottom, which is more traditional than the previous design.

Less of a blog, more of a nod in the direction of standard website formats. I’ve experienced the redesign of another website i frequent quite recently, and although originally daunting, the new structure emerged victorious over its outdated predeccesor. I’m sure the same will be applicable here.

I’m enjoying the angular stylings, as i detest too many curves and flowing lines.

Congratultions, Ollie.

Regarding the rotation on refreshes, I had a similar thought about causing confusion over what is new content, so I took it one step further and thought about it changing every few seconds, say 10 or 20. But not a sharp change, some clever fade in/fade out thing. However, that is totally beyond my capabilities at the moment. I’ll take a look around later in the week and see if anyone has done this already.

I’ve decided to add BlogF1 to my bookmarks toolbar, in Firefox. It can replace the official Champ Car website, as I guess I won’t be needing to visit that anymore.

The only improvement I can suggest relates to the positioning of the video player. There’s a lot of unused space to the right, which to me appears a little strange. Perhaps you could remove the ‘Sidepodcast video player’ link, and centralise the console a little bit more. However, if you’re going to be adding links to more video players in the future, then I guess this would be pointless as the empty space will disappear anyway.

The edit button is an excellent addition. In many ways, it’s a little surprising that edit and preview buttons aren’t standard features of blog engines, as they have been included in even the most basic forum software for years. I think you’re being more than generous with the 60 minute limit - I can’t see why anyone would need any longer.

Personally I don’t believe rotating the feature upon refreshes would be a good idea, as this could cause confusion and make it harder for people to establish what is new content. As you post entries regularly anyway, no doubt the feature will get rotated somewhat more naturally anyway.

I actually agree with Clive’s point that design should never come before practicalities/content, just I don’t think that it has in the case of BlogF1. One of my favourite sites was Tim Stannard’s La Liga blog. It was simply black text on a white background (with no graphics), hosted on a blogger account.

Tim’s writing is of such a high quality that he was recently poached by Haymarket, so the blog’s moved homes.

Old site: http://laligaloca.blogspot.com/
New site: http://fourfourtwo.com/blogs/laligaloca/default.aspx

I know it’s become much more colourful, but I preferred the old blogger template. Think I’ll stick to the feed reader for that one.

It takes forever to load and breaks various bits of CSS, but it is there none-the-less. It’s actually quite tricky to get a regular blog view on a page, so if anyone has any bright ideas feel free to share.

Oh, and because it’s not exactly a great fix, I won’t be adding it to the top navigation bar just yet, so you’ll all just have to remember the URL for now. When I can get to work right I’ll pop the link up.

But my criticism of the re-design is a matter of practicalities, not aesthetics (which are a matter of taste anyway). If a site is less functional through a re-design, that matters more than the look of the thing.

Ollie, just a suggestion, if you don’t display images in the second row of current posts the page load time might come down. Also if you have a fat css file, try breaking it into 2-3 different files [read somewhere that it makes some difference].