This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. 765 donors have already invested in our efforts to shed light on the dark and seamy corners of finance. Join us and participate via our Tip Jar or another credit card portal, WePay in the right column, or read about why we’re doing this fundraiser and other ways to donate, such as by check, as well as our current goal, on our kickoff post. And read about our current target here
We’ve made enough changes in the draft website that it seemed like a good idea to seek another round of reader input. Please note that our designer Kristin has done a lot of work on the plumbing to address issues that afflicted a comparatively small number of readers, so some of you may not regard the changes as significant. One big issue was our font is Optima, and on the former site, which had a lot of extremely unconventional coding (and I gather unconventional in a not good way), did default into other fonts for readers that did not have Optima. However, the other aspects of how the template was put together made it pretty much impossible to modify and also produced big demerits with Google (if I ever get time, I’ve learned a ton about the way Google effectively restrains trade by dictating details of the business models of web-based enterprises and would like to write it up. My issues are comparatively minor compared to some of the horror stories I’ve heard). The two big problems were for a of PC users (who tend not to have Optima as a standard font) the default would be Arial, which isn’t particularly attractive, and worse, some of you with older operating systems would get broken-looing renderings if you had not enabled True Type. Tell us if you are still having either problem, and tell us what operating system you are using, and what browser.
One thing that makes a big difference to Google that we need to add is that it penalizes you if you don’t have a short description of what the site is about on the home page. That does not mean an “About” page, that means text in the template proper. I’m looking for reader suggestions. The tag line on our T-shirts, “Money Laid Bare” is apparently too short. 6-9 words is the target. My thought was: “Brutally honest commentary on finance and economics.” Apparently a more distinctive yet accurate description is better than a bland generic one. Any ideas?
Here is where you find the dev site.
Because spambots have discovered the dev site, you need a username and password, which are:
username: preview
password: nakedcap
Changes
As you can see, we did a variant of the old colors. Even though many of you thought the new colors were fine, I thought we should have a go with something like the old ones. The reason they are “something like” rather than “exactly like” is that the specific orange-blue combination we had before actually does not have good associations in ad land (our designer used to work in advertising). She selected a better blue and then the corresponding orange.
We also made the Tip Jar smaller and moved the Archives into the header bar. The order of things in the right column still is not quite correct, but the way the site is now coded, even Lambert or I can rearrange them with a drag and drop in the backstage, so we are working on other issues first. We also made the main text column a bit narrower, since some of you found it to be too wide and that reduced readability.
Known Issues
1. Need to reduce font size slightly, which may lead to further adjustment of column width (done – it’s now 14 pixels instead of 16 pixels – Kristin)
2. Need a dingbat before each post in Recent Items (done – Kristin)
3. Sharing buttons go in header bar, and Search buttons (search site and search comments) go in right column (search: want to look at better search options than Google, sharing: all social media buttons I had wanted to make grayscale (rollover to color) with the old color scheme, but I’m going to wait until colors are finalized before putting the work into the social media buttons looks everywhere, so those you even see now will change – Kristin)
4. The Recent Comments needs fixing, each comment has way too much text. Three lines is probably the maximum (done – can’t help the length of URLs they count as one word each – Kristin)
5. We will look to see if there is a WP print plugin (to let you print a page of post text only sans the right column items); there either is or isn’t and if there is we will add it (I can easily make a custom style sheet for printing – Kristin)
We have a lot of smaller consistency/streamlining issues, but I thought I’d spare you a long list.
(Kristin here: I’m embedding two screenshots, one “before” and one the way it is now so you may reference the difference, as I will be modifying things while you are possibly looking at the live code – hey and thanks, BTW for the positive and constructive comments on the last post about this; you won’t hurt my feelings and I don’t even ask that you keep it clean, I want to build what makes you happy to use this every day so honesty is the only requirement)
Any comment or suggestions very much appreciated!
Seeking Reader Input on Improved Alpha Version of Our Redesign
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