Sigh. (courtesy kucuu.com)

Nick [not shown] has been hard at it, modifying TTAG’s new site design. Rest assured that we’re contemplating all of your suggestions and implementing more than a few of them. The typeface will be a’ changin’ back to something with a serif. We’re also tweaking the background colors so we don’t sear your eyeballs. Looking for a fix for iPad compatibility. And stuff. Although Nick’s been a brick, we’re looking to build-out these new changes with a professional designer, starting Tuesday next week. As a firm believer that everything either grows or dies, TTAG’s visual evolution is critical to its survival. That said, we will do everything we can to keep the site clean, mean and less obscene. (As you can see there are limitations . . .)  Meanwhile, again, thanks for your patience and understanding.

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83 COMMENTS

  1. I’m sure Nick is comfortable with WordPress, but a something like SquareSpace does all the magic for you for turning the site into a mobile site without having to spend hours re-coding

  3. How do I get to the forum. The two(?) boxes on the left that say TTAG Forum don’t lead anywhere.

  5. I’m grateful that Robert and Nick have taken the time and effort to publish this website. It provides a venue about gun related issues that didn’t really exist before – sort of like a gunnies version of Breitbart. I’m sure the continuing tweeks to the site will improve it in the long run, but change isn’t easy and it’s not always to everyone’s liking.

    All things considered, put me down as being very happy with the general direction, if not every specific detail, of the changes being made.

  6. TO: Bob
    RE: That’s NOT ‘Nick’?!???!?!

    How disappointing…..

    Regards,

    Chuck(le)
    P.S. Who IS she? And how do we contact her?

    P.P.S. Not that I need her myself. The distaff is the pleasurable admixture of the woman from Proverbs 31 and the female lead in Lifeforce.

    However, other—less fortunate—men might want a ‘shot’ at her.

    • Yes, this new site is TTAG’s Deadspin moment. I’ve warned you guys about going Deadspin for like two years now. I despise this new format.

      • Gawker Guns. It’ll attract the same type of empty-headed millenials that know jack-squat about a subject, but comment based on their vapid feels. The red on grey is really hard on the eyes, not in a aesthetically unpleasant sense, but in a strain sense.

        i09mm here we come!

    • Fun fact for you, the Coke you drink now is New Coke.

      Coke did not account for the emotional attachment people had to the product. Their sudden change, not the inferiority of the product which won every blind taste test, which doomed New Coke.

      After thar failure Coke made incremental formula changes and no one noticed/cared. Several lessons in that I think.

  8. Keep up the good work. Kudos for Nick for slogging thru the hard work, and I am sure you will be constantly tweaking and thanks for listening to the customer.

    The content is king, as is the community and I’ll be back, for that, over and over,
    no matter what it looks like, frankly.

    I do like the cleaner look and expect you will get lots more younger eyeballs wiith mobile capable format, which I would guess is the key to building viewers and page count..

    Thanks for the darker font.
    Still a bit bright in the back, and
    I vote for something other than Soviet Red Banner.

    You could always add in some blue and white? FORWARD!

    jk!

  9. PS: just noticed the categories on right- was hunting there before? If not thanks!
    Looking forward to more- have the young Texans gotten you a date for a pig hunt yet Robt? Now THAT would be interesting…

  10. Not sure if it has been mentioned, but the big red toolbar that hovers at the top eats up valuable screen real-estate on my ipad mini.

    If I need to access those menu items it is quite easy to just scroll back to the top.

    • That is YOUR PROBLEM for using an iPad mini….

      Of course, the rest of the world’s viewing pleasure should be bent to serve you, right?

      Maybe you should just use a real tablet with usable resolution?

      “Gee Wiz TTAG…. I am trying to view your blog on my trusty nokia, can you reformat completely for my benefit?”

      • Damn, who pissed in your cornflakes. I was just mentioning something about the redesign that I didn’t care for. I wasn’t asking to have the entire website redesigned for my benefit. Hyperbole much?

        Even if it is something they don’t change, won’t bother me too much. I just thought TTAG was asking for feedback.

        I have an idea, why don’t you let the civilized folks talk while you wash the sand out of your vagina.

  11. A couple of comments on the new design …

    I would suggest keeping a sans-serif. Except for headlines, they are much easier to read.

    I stumbled over the new design on my iPad last night. I (sort of) liked the format, but it was very unstable. Either it kept crashing, or the pages were way off to the side and I was unable to center them.

    However, on my desktop Mac, it seems to be fine.

  12. This format takes forever to load images over a 4g mobile network using an android device.

    Even though that’s negative feedback I hope it’s helpful.

    • I haven’t been experiencing any trouble, but then I primarily use the actual mobile site, not the bastardized desktop version.

  13. Large font size is annoying, spacing between lines is annoying, color scheme is annoying… Was this designed for tablets first? Because it’s a pain to read it on a laptop.

    • “Space between lines” reminds me of a few months back when Chrome increased the white-spacing on all their menus (and didn’t offer a way to turn it off for desktop users), to make the browser more “cross-platform (touchscreen) compatible.” It made all their menus look double-spaced, which looks stupid on a PC monitor. It’s possible to get rid of the extra spacing, but it requires command line switches, which seems stupid to me. Just put a checkbox in the settings menu, ffs.

      By the way, for those who want to do so, go into properties for your Chrome shortcut, and find the ‘Target:’ line. By default it will say:

      C:UsersMattAppDataLocalGoogleChromeApplicationchrome.exe

      and you want to append

      --force-fieldtrials="NewMenuStyle/Compact2/" (There is a space at the beginning of that line.)

      to the end of that line, so it now appears:

      C:UsersMattAppDataLocalGoogleChromeApplicationchrome.exe --force-fieldtrials="NewMenuStyle/Compact2/"

      Hmm, the stupid {code} command seems to be causing all my backslashes ( ) to get deleted, but the appended command line info doesn’t contain any, so you can copypasta it as it is.

      From then on, anytime Chrome is opened by the shortcut, the menus will appear in their old, single-spaced format. However, if Chrome isn’t open, and you do something that forces it to open (like clicking a link in Outlook or some other program, it will open in the new default, double-spaced format.

      • It looks the same in Firefox, although I just refreshed and now the font seems smaller (better) and even though the line spacing still seems to be 1.5 or something like that, it doesn’t look as bad now, but I personally don’t like it. Old text formatting was easier on the eyes.

  15. TTAG was a good site.

    It appears that in pursuit of the almighty dollar the visual and editorial content are being bastardized to appeal to skulls full of mush.

    It was good while it lasted.

  16. You should not be doing this to your production site. Doing so damages your credibility and advertisors’ confidence in the brand. You should create a development environment on seperate servers with a slightly different name (thetruthaboutguns-stg.com or similar is common). You can give this name out to the testers and select clients.

    Please roll back all the changes so I can have a sane TTAG experience.

    • Fucking thread winner.. right here. this guy wins.

      I’m YAWSD (yet another website developer) and doing what you’re doing violates every principal of the SDLC known.

      Please put these changes in a public sandbox for feedback.

    • ^^^ THIS ^^^

      Do a BETA website in parallel for testing purposes. When changes are perfected there, bring them here. Not before.

    • Flippin’ thread winner.. right here. this guy wins.

      I’m YAWSD (yet another website developer) and doing what you’re doing violates every principal of the SDLC known.

      Please put these changes in a public sandbox for feedback.

    • We have a dev site. But none of the issues we’re seeing were evident on it. These are particular quirks with the way TTAG runs and its readers use the site, and mostly cosmetic.

      I for one liked the first version we set out.

      • Nick:

        The first version wasn’t horrible, and even the sans serif wasn’t bad once you turned up the contrast on it. (Although it was still quite large; I was running my browser at 90% zoom.) You could even go back to the sans serif if you really wanted to, just knock the size down a point or two. (Or don’t, and I’ll just leave my browser at 90%. It’s smart and remembers the setting.) If you keep the serif that’s here now, you might want to raise the font size a notch or two, because it’s smaller than it used to be (look at TTAK for comparison) and I can see people complaining that it’s hard to read due to its size.

        I don’t mind the red at all, especially after you changed it. (I think you turned down the intensity on it a little, didn’t you?) I don’t really get the complaints about the color, because it only shows up on the top menu bar and on the Post Comment button below this window anyway. For as little screen as it covers, it could be hot pink for all I care, as long as you can read the text on it.

        I very much appreciate the light gray background instead of the bright white. I still don’t like it as much as the old tan, but it’s definitely livable.

        It wouldn’t surprise me if you’re close to the “fvck it” point with all the criticism this has gotten, and for my part in that I apologize. I know you’re just trying to make things better, and its in that vein that my comments were offered.

      • Is that a public sandbox? if not, you should make it (or make one) so you can screw around at whim and people can help you live test.

        (side note: I’ve NO complaints about the design, though I do like Segoe UI over most fonts. )

      • Did you actually have someone other than an admin or developer try it. You obviously didn’t try it on a variety of devices and browsers/RSS engines. I rip lazy developers for this whenever I can. There’s no excuse but laziness…

  17. Not that it would do anything for me, but I feel like the proper way to deal with Israeli supermodel links is to have Kristen start linking to models that our female shooters might find pleasant to look at.

    I mean, it’s not sexist if its equal opportunity, right?

  18. A comment box format size that reflects the actual size of what will be seen after you hit submit. Is there a comment box anywhere online that accurately reflects
    the true right-hand margin breaks, where a new line of text begins? The comment boxes are always bigger than what actually gets published. I realize that everyone does not come from a typesetting background, but can’t these fargin comment boxes be sized to show how it will look when the comment is finally published?
    Do the ad margin at the right side of the page need to be that large? Do you see how messed-up this looks?

    • I don’t understand the issue. What difference does it make where the right-hand margin is, unless you’re inserting a carriage return manually at the end of each line. And if you are, why?

        • I’ve never seen that, and I’ve accessed this site on 3-4 different PC platforms and 2-3 Android ones. All the text boxes wrap.

  19. Content should be on the CENTER of the page. Not on the left. You’re going to kill your readership doing that. You should take some advice from greatest sales letter copywriter who ever lived, Gary Halbert.

    You want people to read your blogs daily and look at all those ads that pay the bills for the site? You do?

    Take a hint …

    KEEP THE MAIN CONTENT ON THE CENTER OF THE PAGE!

    You’re traffic, hits, returning visits, etc, etc will die, by having content on the left hand side of the page.

    Need any more hints?

    http://www.thegaryhalbertletter.com

    Tony

    • I’m trying to decide if you’re a shill, or if this was a legitimate comment.

      I just looked at a half dozen random pages on that guy’s site, and on every single one of them was at least one example of things I hate about shitty web pages, and things that make me close the tab without scrolling off the first screen.

      That guy is all about marketing, and about inserting the ads into the content, so that they look like the content, so that people are halfway through reading them before they realize they’re reading an advertisement. Nothing will send me to the ‘Close tab’ button faster than that “marketing genius” bullshit.

      What’s really funny is that despite his efforts to make the advertisements blend in, every single page on that site looks immediately like a page that’s trying to sell me something. Every single one looks like if I scroll to the very bottom, I’ll find a “But wait! There’s more!” offer, and then an offer to sell me something for the “Low, low price of only $29.95.”

      You want to know how RF and friends could kill TTAG? By following ANY of the bullshit that’s on your link.

      I still haven’t decided if you’re a shill, or just well-meaning but misguided.

  20. Please don’t get rid of the floating arrows on the side that lead to next/previous articles. I love it.

    But bring back the ttag green!

  22. please Puh-leeeze tell me you are serious about the serifs :/ .i hate sans serif fonts. i mean ,sure, helvetica has superior readability, but i don’t care, as my relaxed rate is 400 wpm for most any font,for light reading. and the cap i and the lower L look exactly the same (Il) which drives me NUTS
    i’m not talking faux-nut peanut legumes here, i’m talking walNUT NUTTY!!!!

  23. Yep, This new format SUCKS. Hurts my head, my eyes, harder to read. The old site had class, This site sucks a**.

  24. The RSS feed no longer works, at least from Firefox’s Live Bookmarks. I’m afraid that I will not visit TTAG as often if I must go to the homepage first.

  25. The RSS feed no longer works, at least from Firefox’s live bookmarks. I’m afraid that I will not visit TTAG as often if I must go to the homepage first.

  26. While the new format is ok, is there a way to go back to the old one? eg old.thetruthaboutguns.com/blah/blah/gunsrkoolantisdrool
    I don’t know if it would be a big change, I guess if you use relative addressing for things it mioght be but idk

    maybe we could get the old css, and flag everything with !important and just use that as a user defined css when using the site?

  27. Who knew there were SO MANY pro-fessional web designers in the world! No wonder tech support has been outsourced to India and manufacturing to China…:)

    Seriously, change is good. People don’t like change. Everyone is a web designer, and you will NEVER make EVERYONE happy NO MATTER what you do. So…whatever…

  28. Why are you trying to “FIX” a format that didn’t need changing to begin with.
    Seem everytime someone “tries” to upgrade format or layout, they are just dumbing it down.
    This site used to easy to read, both on the computer and phone, now I need to find
    another site to get my news. THANKS (sarcasm)

  29. I miss the link at the top and bottom of the individual story page to the preceding and following story. I read on a tablet, so keeping multiple widows open is a PITA. I would just open the first story and browse them fonder at a time, using the links.

    • That’s what the gray arrows on the left and right sides of the screen are, about 3/4 down. Do those not display on your tablet? (I don’t have a tablet, but they show up on my phone.)

      • The arrows blink on for a moment when the page finishes loading, but they disappear before you can click them. Clicking where they were indicates that a blank button is at these spots, but the buttons have no effect.

  30. Thank you for dimming the background, it is much appreciated.

    If the content text (article, comments) could be bumped one font size, it would be absolute perfection.

    Thanks for listening and adjusting to your readers requests.

  38. This new layout completely sucks, the iPad view is terrible and the desktop view only shows posts on half the screen. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it and don’t give me a bs line about visual improvements are vital to your survival. Quit trying to be amateur IT guys and let the pros do it, do what you do best, write about guns.

  39. Please add photos and a snippet of each article back on the main page instead of just headlines. Much easier to decide if it is an article I want to tab to on the tablet and read.

    Also, new color scheme is pretty brash/bold. Maybe an alternate landing page where old timers could read using old css/format?

  42. RSS still borked:

    “This XML document is invalid, likely due to invalid characters. XML error: Invalid character at line 673, column 25″

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