Requests for V11 - Front end redesign

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PedroCury Members Profile Find Members Posts Groupie Joined: 12 July 2008 Status: Offline Points: 49	Post Options Post Reply Quote PedroCury Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Topic: Requests for V11 - Front end redesign Posted: 22 December 2012 at 8:23pm
	Hi, I think this year we had a huge evolution with HTML5, CSS3 and JQuery. I believe it would be really good to apply some of this stuff in the forum. While doing a full redesign is hard and takes time, there are a few stuff that can have a great impact in page loading speeds and so on. - Web Icon Fonts - Loading every single icon for each topic is really heavy on resources. Now there´s the possibility of loading a font that have enough icons that can have diferent colors and so on. Only one load, smaller in size, much faster. Or at least have a sprite for the icons (less effective). - Lazy load - When someone loads the topic from beggining... jQuery can load only the first 3 posts (for example) and other topics will be loaded as the user scrolls down. This will improve the loading speed, specialy for mobile / tablets. - Modals and tooltips - No more new windows for admin topics. Modals are much faster! Users can also have help by tooltips and modals too. A much harder redesign would be using another alternative for tables... but I´m not sure If this is really necessary or have much impact on loading. But it is probably better for handling a responsive design If it´s a future plan.

IanSmithISA Members Profile Find Members Posts Groupie Joined: 21 October 2010 Location: Worcester Status: Offline Points: 127	Post Options Post Reply Quote IanSmithISA Report Post Thanks(1) Quote Reply Posted: 23 December 2012 at 8:24am
	Good morning As a normal forum host/user what I want the most is one that works, whilst presentation is also important it is definitely secondary to working. HTML5/CSS3 -it is going to be a long time until nearly everyone has upgraded their browsers to ones that support HTML5. I am still using Win XP when I have a choice. Icons - I modified my forums to remove the little icons that appear before things like FAQ, search, Events as they can take a while to appear, otherwise the page takes quite a while to be settled. Icons were a good idea in Windows 2, where there were so few but now they are meaningless. Modals and tooltips - The problems with a Javascript based UI is that they never seem to work properly, WebWiz will be spending their working day trying to work out why this doesn’t work on Chrome, that doesn’t work on Konqueror and t’other doesn’t work in Firefox. Lazy load – Whilst this might help with very slow connections, depending upon exactly how it is done it is going to increase the database server load a lot as you will be rerunning the same query many times to get the next few items. If you have your own server just hosting the forum database this may not be too bad, but for a shared server it would take some investigation to know the exact effect. If there was a hosting cost associated with this change you may be happy, but I don’t know about other forum hosts. It is almost certain that this will not work in some browsers. I would suggest that chasing cosmetic changes will have little effect on users of the forums but consume a lot of development time. There are an awful lot of styling tweaks that you can make by changing the style sheets but at the end of the day a forum still needs a list of topics. If you are prepared to make the odd tweak to the asp pages then you can make even more changes. If there is any spare development resource, I would be a fan of an ASP.Net rewrite, this would make it easier to integrate the forum into an ASP.Net site rather than have it as a standalone site and may have the side effect of more community supplied enhancements. Bye Ian
	Why does anyone need more than an 80x25 character only VDU?

PedroCury Members Profile Find Members Posts Groupie Joined: 12 July 2008 Status: Offline Points: 49	Post Options Post Reply Quote PedroCury Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 23 December 2012 at 1:05pm
	Hey Ian, I would agree, but... I´m talking about performance and user experience, not only cosmetic. There were two things you didn´t considered (and I didn´t make it clear from the beggining): faster loads are good for SEO and how many requests a big forum have. So... google now takes into consideration (and I believe this will be even more critical from now on) how fast your site loads, for ranking you better. There´s also a lot os statistics about the faster it loads, the higher you convert (whatever your goal is). So improving loading speed is now more important than ever. About HTML5 compatibility... there are a lot of easy workarounds.HTML5 bootstrap for example is a framework that you include just with a few line of codes and It will identify If the browser support HTML5. If it doesn´t it simulate the markup with regular HTML. Yes, HTML5 has a lot of new markup and some have already incompatibility issues, BUT you doesn´t need to usem them all. What is really new and problematic is video tags, off line saving, drag and drop and all this stuff we will not use in the forum anyway. HTML5 is also not mandatory for using jQuery and I´m not sure If it is for using webfonts. "Icons were a good idea in Windows 2" - I totally disagree and tablets / mobile are here to prove it. THis is all about user experience. I´m a advanced user, I don´t need icons, but most of the people do. Maybe we don´t need 15 icons, but we need some. Sprites will make the loading faster, font icons will make them even faster. "The problems with a Javascript based UI is that they never seem to work properly" - This used to be true before good frameworks were stable. JQuery is supposed to solve compatibility problems. Still, when talking about new technology we can have surprises - mouse over tooltips doesn´t work for touch interfaces for example - but tootips can be changed for popovers. No problem! Lazy load - "is going to increase the database server load a lot as you will be rerunning the same query many times to get the next few items." - Not really, It will increase at maximum as much as pagination. Instead of going to next page and load headers, footers and all icons for topic options, it will only load new posts. You can combine pagination with lazyload too. I can´t guarantee, but I believe there are also smarter solutions nowadays, like loading a full page of database info for example, but rendering posts as you scroll down. So it will be faster to render the page (since avatar and topic images are what makes it slow) and without DB overload. I understand this can not be super easy to develop... but maybe it can be done little by little. The tecnology has evolved and it is much more compatible... as I said... all these things works on mobile and tablets, that are a huge new market. Tapatalk forum app for example has 100.000 downloads and is a forum app only! So... I´m making these suggestions because I ´m being forced to run a much better site for next year... simple because of the competition... there are wordpress websites that are amazing and it´s much easier to develop... so now I have to be, at least, as cool as they are... so I started to understand a bit more about front end and there already amazing solutions... still... I didn´t say it is so easy! I don´t even want to learn it... but they are the future and looks really good! cheers

Scotty32 Members Profile Find Members Posts Moderator Group Joined: 30 November 2002 Location: Manchester, UK Status: Offline Points: 1682	Post Options Post Reply Quote Scotty32 Report Post Thanks(1) Quote Reply Posted: 23 December 2012 at 10:31pm
	The problem with having a love for JavaScripts is that you have to consider people who do not have JavaScripts enabled. So your example of lazy load, the inital page loads 3 topics but without JavaScripts turned on I would have to click next after reading 3 posts at a time, rather than 10 or 20. And the suggestion it would not increase DB loads is strange, since the loads would be increased a lot as people would be loading the "next page" faster than with traditional paginate, you would only cut down on HTML sent to the browser not DB loads. (remember it would still include all of the security checks, to avoid displaying private posts to unauthorised users) As a side note, use of Ajax and other JavaScript technologies can have a negative impact on the SEO of a website (which you seem concerned about) As for HTML5, I think it would be unwise for something like Web Wiz Forums to force this upon users when it has not yet finished being standardised. As mentioned about lack of support for all browsers as well as old browsers, it would be an ongoing nightmare to keep up with any changes that happen to the incomplete standard, as well as changes in different browsers. I agree that there are many great new technologies available today that could be included in Web Wiz Forums. However I have always believed it is a mistake to use flashy new tech for the sake of using flashy new tech, you should be using the best tool for the job.
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WebWiz-Bruce Members Profile Find Members Posts Admin Group Web Wiz Developer Joined: 03 September 2001 Location: Bournemouth Status: Offline Points: 9844	Post Options Post Reply Quote WebWiz-Bruce Report Post Thanks(1) Quote Reply Posted: 24 December 2012 at 9:52am
	There are allot of interesting items to look in to. Some concerns though include the use of JavaScript to load in the posts. Google does now look at the speed at which the page loads, which is why allot of time was spent on optimising Web Wiz Forums to only use a very small number of database calls to speed up the page load. If you use JavaScript to load in Topics and Posts then there are two issues, the first and worse being that Search Engines will no longer be able to index the contents of posts. While the page may initially load faster the extra database calls, and the extra load of additional JavaScript will slow down the overall page loading if you wanted to look at a post near the bottom.
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PedroCury Members Profile Find Members Posts Groupie Joined: 12 July 2008 Status: Offline Points: 49	Post Options Post Reply Quote PedroCury Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 24 December 2012 at 10:50am
	Yeah... about SEO indexing it is a true concern for lazy loading. I´m not sure If there´s a way to make only the robots see the whole topic, even because I believe they don´t follow javascript rules, and maybe have a simple link like "All pages" (to display the whole topic without pagination) could do the magic (but I´m just speculating). About javascript enabled... this is easy... just identify If it´s enabled... If it not, no lazy load, just regular pagination. Another "half" solution would be only using the lazy loading when users visit topics they follow. They are usually only interested in the last answer anyway and there is a chance they even don´t scroll the page up. But maybe the programming can be tricky. One more thing to consider is instead of auto lazy loading, the user can have a mixed solution like I said before... example... your forum shows 20 posts by page.. in the end you can have a "Load More" button and also the page numbers. If the user hits the load more, it will load only the posts... so it will be faster than using pagination and the DB load will be actually smaller, since will not load the topic info. Another problem for some people (me included) will be that lazy loads will generate less pageviews in the end... so If you are selling banner exposure... this is bad. Well... I agree that using the latest new tech in a stablished project is dangerous... specially in the forum that should run perfectly in all plataforms, but we should keep eyes opened, since some stuf are started to getting stable now... all this stuff used to exist more than 5 years ago, with DHTML and Javascript, but by that time it was a pain in the ass for compatibilitty... now we have facebook using some stuff with success... and they also have to work in a lot of different user platforms too. Anyway... the icon improvement maybe is a easy one and have a great impact... If you can look a little deeper into it, would be great! :)

IanSmithISA Members Profile Find Members Posts Groupie Joined: 21 October 2010 Location: Worcester Status: Offline Points: 127	Post Options Post Reply Quote IanSmithISA Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 24 December 2012 at 1:17pm
	Good afternoon ..So If you are selling banner exposure This raises an interesting question, whilst I do have an Adsense add on my forum I am not using the forum as a money generating object. You may have highlighted a conflict of objectives between those who use the forum 1) As a pure forum where advertising doesn’t really count. 2) As a forum where money generation is important 3) As the basis for advanced communication that is only partly forum and partly Facebookish with all sorts of extra features. My forum is both part of the support process for a couple of software products as well as part of a range of sites, that all interlink aiming to grab people looking for one thing and directing them to where I want them to go. If you pick one of my sites, you will find that they all have a Group Sites link in the page footer, if you bounce around these sites, you will see that they all sort of lead back to certain sites that sell software items or services, I am still in the middle of this processes of building the really core site. For me it would be a disaster if the Webwiz Forum started to look like a social media site, well actually it wouldn’t because I only use a small portion of its capabilities and I would simply create my own. As I understand the speed issue, Google started doing this in early 2010 so it is not particularly new. As I understand web icon fonts, the “correct” way to do this is via the @font-face rule, the trouble is that this is only supported in IE 9 and above and IE9 will not run on WinXP nor I believe in the Symbian browser in my Nokia E5. In the same way that WebWiz Newspad is separate from the WebWiz Forum, it may be that there is a market for a new product that is a much more advanced forum/communications centre. This new product could say; “I’m only for users on the leading edge”, I for one wouldn’t be a taker of it though. It may be that for a certain type of user, the path is to start off with the WebWiz forum, slowly enhance and modify it and one day you will have replaced all the relevant bits of the WebWiz forum with your own functionality. Once you start modifying the standard release, you have to add your changes into subsequent releases and this is both a pain and boring. This does of course raise the question of does Webwiz hosting exist to support Webwiz forums or does the forum exist to promote the hosting? Bye Ian
	Why does anyone need more than an 80x25 character only VDU?

PedroCury Members Profile Find Members Posts Groupie Joined: 12 July 2008 Status: Offline Points: 49	Post Options Post Reply Quote PedroCury Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 15 January 2013 at 3:15pm
	Getting back... About compatibility..as I said.. there are solutions... If the browser doesn´t support one technology it will render the older. I´m not specialist in front end anyway to know If it works as it should... but that´s what they promise. It´s not about leading edge... is about usability. Another interesting points are: - The forum goal should be to have maximum compatibility or solve users problems with a easy and fast interface ? - How many % of users would not be able to use a forum that has no compatibility with IE6 - ? - How many are not satisfied at all to have outdated usability ? - How fast these two extremes grows and how many users you gonna loose in the end ? Doesn´t matter you forum goal... users will prefer to have their posts appering right after clicking Post Reply (by ajax) than having to wait a full load of the same page... specially in old/slow platforms! This is user experience. How hard and risky is to do it is another history... I just disagree this is not as (or more) important as having a system that works perfectly in a 3+ years old platform.

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