Punctuality Rules!

Comparison

Comparison

Just for comparison’s sake.

The old design (click for bigger):

pr-originaldesign

The new design. (Well, obviously, this is what you’re LOOKING at, but I figure this makes for good record-keeping for any future changes I might make, so…)

PR-new design 11-29-08

A friend and I were just chatting about how much more “open” the new design feels, but I find it hard to pinpoint WHY. Sure, the background color is lighter, and the Navbar/Tabs are light gray instead of blue, but otherwise, it looks awfully similar, just with the sidebar on the right … And yet, it FEELS so much more open.

Why do you suppose that is?

11 thoughts on “Comparison

  1. --Deb Post author

    True. The horizontal width IS bigger, and white space is not a bad thing.

    That reminds me, though … I should reformat my header image so it’s the same width as the page …

  2. --Deb Post author

    I think more and more sites are doing right-sided sidebars, so we’re getting more used to SEEING them, so that anything else just doesn’t look right anymore. (Because, well, duh, it’s on the LEFT.)

  3. jc

    Your eye is trained to scan left-to-right. The lefthand sidebars tend to interrupt the scanning. With the shifting of the sidebar to the right, teh eye glides more easily over the text. Or at least that’s what I remember from my old Sensation & Perception class that I TAed

  4. Ari Herzog

    It’s also important to have content on left and sidebars on right if you have mobile users, for pages are seen vertically, so if sidebars are on left, one has to scroll through all of it.

  5. --Deb Post author

    JC and Ari–good points. Especially about the mobile users–something I usually forget about since my cell phone doesn’t DO internet browsing. (I really need to change that one of these days.)

  6. Constance

    Chiming in rather late–I think it could be the light color in the foreground and background, with the noticeably darker color between. It adds a certain crispness. Plus, having the tabs above the banner, rather than below it, and especially having the tabs no longer darker than the banner, gives a feeling of openness as well.