Thanks for clicking the link to read this. Let's talk about the big changes that are in progress across the site.
As I'm sure you've noticed by now if this isn't your first time visiting, MacDat looks very different now. The old light-purple/blue and gold UI is gone - and it's being replaced by what you see now. I've done this for a few reasons.
First, the old UI had a few issues. The biggest in my opinion is that it just didn't look very nice. Sure, the site was always meant to be styled after "the old web", but I feel that the previous UI was a bit too basic, and just wasn't great to look at. In addition, while pages like that do look fine on older devices with lower resolution displays, viewing the site on a 1080p+ panel with the previous styling left everything stretched across the screen, and I didn't like that too much. It had also not evolved one bit since I started work on the site really, and my skills with HTML have gotten a tad bit better since then. So, I set to redesign it.
For the new UI, I wanted to bring the site up to something that wouldn't be too out of place in the mid-late 2000s, as opposed to the previous design which screams 90s. I chose that goal as for one, that era of UI design is in my opinion some of the best we've had - all modern websites just about look the same, and are quite flat and boring. And two, it's about the newest my ameuture HTML/CSS skills are able to take me. And still, it's nowhere near as complex as other sites at that time. But I think it looks nice.
I went and got feedback from the 68kMLA and TinkerDifferent forums for my original prototype of this new styling as well, which has been up on my site for the past few days as a demo page. From there, I made two main modifications. One being a change of the custom background to much lighter and more evenly-colored one of blurred clouds, and I also added a 50% transparent box around the main page content to increase readability. These two changes have in my opinion created a site that both looks pretty good, and is also easy to read. Thank you to everyone who gave their valuable feedback!
As of this site release, a large amount of pages are currently still using the old styling. Each page has to be manually converted as of right now, and doing so for every single page may take some time. However, I have already converted over a large number of pages, which I'll list below:
The next main focus on the site will be to get all pages compliant with the new styling. During this period, new site content will be sparce.
One of the major benefits of the old UI was that it would work on really old web browsers without any issues. This is still something that I do care about with the new styling, and I think it offers an ok compromise. Currently from my testing, the new UI will render mostly ok on Internet Explorer 5 and up. There are a couple of rendering issues, but none that affect the site's function. I feel that this is a decent compromise, as the vast majority of users will be connecting from modern browsers, and so I'm going to prioritize their experience for the time being. The bigger concern right now is that my hosting changed some security setting and so those browsers can't load the site at all right now! I'm going to have to take some time to figure out how to fix that.
So, that's about all for this development update. Much more is coming soon! Check back over the next few days.