You're Probably Wondering Why I've Called You All Here Today
I always wanted to start a meeting that way. Of course, it's no fun if it's not followed by a plan to take over the world.Anyway, if you clicked on a debabblog link or feed, you may be surprised to find yourself here today. I have, after far too many months of branding and design angst, relaunched the debbablog as User Effect. In addition to deciding that the old domain name was too hard to spell and only made sense after I explained it with charts and diagrams, I wanted to reflect the blog's strong shift towards topics and issues in usability.
Over the next few months, I'll be continuing to explore website usability, with a mix of theoretical and practical topics. At the same time, I'm looking forward to exploring the idea of the "user effect", the ways in which people have changed the internet and the internet has changed how people work and play.
If you're visiting via RSS or my Feedburner feed, I'm currently keeping those intact or redirecting, so everything should continue to operate as is. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy the new look and direction.
Dr. Pete
· Thursday, August 23Thanks, Mike. I'll be discussing some of the design rationale a bit in future posts, but I opted to go for a happy medium between 800x600 and 1024x768. People at the lower resolution should (knock on wood) just lose the right-hand column.
You, of course, already have an honored place in my blogroll :)
Ken
· Thursday, August 23Congrats on getting the new design/new logo up... looks great!
Sean
· Friday, August 24Very nice looking and well presented. I think it will serve you well, which means those months of angst have paid off.
Kevin
· Friday, August 24Looking good. The layout is clean, and more importantly, it's effective. No-nonsense windows, links, and lines that get straight to the point. The contrast is especially good, with the "soft" white on grey doing a great job of moving the user's eye to the articles without a "harsh" white on black design.
You might want to consider improving usereffect for 1600x1200 resolution (what I'm currently running my laptop at IBM on), but I wonder if many users use this resolution, and you'll probably be covering this in future posts anyway so I likely didn't need to mention it. At the moment, the right half of my screen is like staring at a concrete wall.
Dr. Pete
· Friday, August 24Hmmm... it's supposed to auto-center at least, but apparently my CSS isn't working quite right. I'll have to test that a bit more. CSS-based layout drives me nuts.
Mike Maddaloni
· Thursday, August 23Congrats on the redesign Dr. Pete, and an excellent design it is! Very clean, well spaced, and room for growth with the sidebars.
mp/m