Welcome to the new-look Head for Points

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• Craig says:

  18 Aug18 August 13:15

  Finally! Ha. I agree with your sentiment about being dated and I’m glad it was known. I would love to have helped in this. I hope you’re happy with it and it helps reach more people with what is a very informative and useful source. Hears to becoming the 350th site in the UK!

  • Rhys says:

    18 Aug18 August 13:17

    It’s been a long time coming!

    • Craig says:

      18 Aug18 August 22:48

      Yes. I think having read some of the moans on here about the update today, they may not be as vocal had you updated in smaller chunks over a long period, it’s a great way to develop software. Big changes are never welcome but people soon forget and move on. When Slack or even Insta changed their logo, their was uproar, that was just over a logo! Best of luck.

      • Rhys says:

        19 Aug19 August 09:15

        That wouldn’t have been possible. This was a complete rebuild because, frankly, web standards have moved on in the last decade!

• Venturelog says:

  18 Aug18 August 13:17

  In General i like the layout. However the comments on articles still seem to be defaulting to the latest ones. Are there plans to change the default to the 1st page, or perhaps a drop down box at the top to select what page?

  • Rhys says:

    18 Aug18 August 13:20

    There were, but it’s something that is a bit more complicated than we first thought. Still something we’re looking into.

    • Jon says:

      18 Aug18 August 13:40

      While you’re at it… an option to select the number of comments shown per page might be handy – 10/20/50/all or whatever.

      • RussellH says:

        18 Aug18 August 15:04

        I only ever use a desktop to look at websites, so what I say has zero relevance to those who use a mobile to do so. (I do sometimes have to look at gov.uk websites on someone else’s mobile – it is always a pretty painful experience.)

        First BIG thought – why on earth are only 56 comments spread over as many as five pages? If you have to split it up into tiny chunks, as Jon says, please make it permanently configurable, and preferably defaulting to as large anumber as possible.

        Second thought – threading is much clearer than it used to be, but it could still be improved. That said, I have never seen anything on Windows that does really clear threading…

        • RussellH says:

          18 Aug18 August 15:08

          I started to write a third comment, which was positive, but then I could not type any more. There is no indication of a maximum no. of chars – there should be.

          Third thought – the comments box (into which I am typing at present) is much improved. It used to be that extending it vertically tended to distort it so much that it was as difficult to read what had been written after extending as bef[this is as far as I could get]ore…

        • Rhys says:

          18 Aug18 August 15:11

          We will be removing the character limit – it was unexpected!

        • Rob says:

          18 Aug18 August 15:08

          Comments thread by the number of FIRST LEVEL comments. On a typical HFP article, you’d get 15 comments from 5 first level comments, because B and C reply to A and then D, E and F reply to B or C.

          This particular article is not representative because people are not replying to each other!

          Nothing has changed from the old site re comment threading.

  • Rob says:

    18 Aug18 August 15:23

    We asked and the developer said it was too complex. I think there is a way (because I can do it, globally, by flicking a switch in the back-end) so we will try. It was on our list of features when we started the process.

• Hingeless says:

  18 Aug18 August 13:18

  Love it!

• Adrian says:

  18 Aug18 August 13:19

  Visually, working on a large desktop it’s night and day vs. the old format.

• Oh! Matron! says:

  18 Aug18 August 13:19

  So pretty! And modern…. A good look 🙂

• Optimus Prime says:

  18 Aug18 August 13:23

  It looks great. I miss the links to most recent comments though.

• Jon says:

  18 Aug18 August 13:36

  I like it (despite my initial reaction being one of clutter / information overload – but possibly just a case of getting used to it). Giving the right-hand column a slightly different background shade may perhaps help with that, not sure.

  One thing though – use of upper case text. Long headlines are much harder to read in all caps, and (to me) add to the visual clutter. I’m thinking mainly the linked articles in the Today’s Top Stories panel, but perhaps also the comment bylines (although that might be because the text seems – to me – to be too big relative to the actual comment – the information hierarchy feels a bit messed up there).

  Viewing on iPad in case that makes any difference.

  Have you done (or will you be doing) any eye tracking and/or usability tests on it? They’re usually fun to watch, and enlightening… 😉

  Well done on a successful upgrade in any case!

  • Jon says:

    18 Aug18 August 13:37

    PS. Is the character-count limit on comments deliberate? 😉

  • Rob says:

    18 Aug18 August 15:21

    Oddly Rhys and I were discussing killing the ‘all caps’ Top Stories this morning. It will probably happen, seems too shouty.

• Doc says:

  18 Aug18 August 13:42

  Well done for coming out of the other side unscathed.
  Looks nicer.
  The comments sections definitely needs updated since still looks clustered and harder to follow the replies to comments etc but am sure you on it already.
  Overall like the layout and will take a few days to get used to it.
  Keep up the good work team HfP.

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