New Look MSE.com

A question about : New Look MSE.com

Next week, I hope we'll convert the site into the new look MoneySavingExpert.com. We've been working on the design quite a long time; and the whole team at MoneySaving Towers, especially the techies have put many hundreds of hours in.

The aim is to keep the feel of the current site, but make it look more up to date, and improve navigation, search (and the site's ranking by search engines), and ease of use. For your interest in earlier versions we went for a very slick look - but it ended up feeling commercial and not like MoneySavingExpert should; so retaining a wee bit of clutter is quite deliberate

UPDATE FRIDAY 25 May Take a peek

To take a view and play with the new look site - just go to

NEW SITE LOOK FINAL TEST VERSION

This is a working model of the new site apart from the forums. We still have a few tweaks to make on the list. However this is nearly how it will appear when it goes live - though its on a test server so it may be slow.

What will the forum look like

We're still working on the forum, but the image below (click it to enlarge) will give you a rough idea of what it will look like.

The forum will be stretchy right across the screen unlike the main site. Also we are planning to change the colour of the forum bit slightly (probably a light green rather than the salmon). The right hand bar is nearly finished except some font changes (e.g. in the ones not to miss they will be Bold Text: unbold text rather than all bolded)

New Look Forum Image
(click to enlarge)

What hasn't changed

The back mechanics of how the forum works and the main site works is the same.

Also the articles are exactly the same, both in look and in content and HTML. The articles come from a database system; so improving their efficiency and look is a seperate job and one of the next things we'll be tackling.

We'll also be looking at improving the search, and continuing to tweak and optimise the performance of the forum (though some big changes there last week seem to have helped).

What feedback am I looking for?

All feedback is welcome; though unlike previous times I've put the new design out for feedback, I've much less room for change now. There comes a time to bite the bullet and go for it and now is that time - primarily because the new look site, works better than the current site.

Yet once its up and running it'll of course continue to be tweaked and improved.

Martin

Best answers:

• First to say Good work! - Looks great!
• Seconded - it looks awesome. Well done tecchy guys
• yeah nice one, alot more professional!
  good work
• It is so much better looking well done to all involved
  Mel
• :t
  :t:t:t:t:t:t:t:t:t:t
• i've always thought the site looked a bit too busy and is quite hard to navigate. it's a lot better now, but i'll be honest i'm not keen on the fonts, especially in the banner. the text with a gradiant, white outline and drop shadow has been done too many times before
• I very much like the idea of having links to the relevant chat board on the section and article pages, can I suggest that these land in FAQ's or other relevant sticky for that section.
  That way if the user wants to ask a question then at least they understand how to phrase it, particularly useful for DFW and SOA's etc.
  Looking very good.
  Well done Martin, Webmaster and all techies.
  edit: will we have to clear cashe and reset bookmarks after the switch over?
• Looks good to me - but my main problem has been the frequent slow loading times. Any hope of improving that.
• Les it depends on whether you mean the forum or the main site. The main site has no slowness and should always be zippy. We do experience slowness
  a. On the checkers (because the same server is used for sending the weekly email and the checkers, yet this is changing so should improve)
  b. The Forums. Simply due to the mass of people using it all accessing one database. We continue to tweak it and are working with the software authors to improve it; some big changes were made five days ago and it seems to have helped.
  Martin
• Hope I don't keep getting lost :rolleyes:
• i like the look of it, will be interesting to see how the forum looks when its done
• Very smart - I like it
• It looks good! Well done and thanks to the techie team for all the hard work.
  Pink
• Pedantic, but correct:
  There should be an S after Martin Lewis' in the page header.
  Just because Lewis ends with S doesn't mean that you lose the S after the apostrophe.
  Lewis's
  Just like the department store of that name (does it still exist??)
• Like I Said.... Yummy!!
  Hmm... Yeah, The banner could do with a tiddle bit of word maybe?
• Martin & the team,
  The site looks great. Very streamlined - but friendly too. I've sometimes found that new people I've refered here have struggled with the main page - but this one looks amazing.
  Thank you for all your hardwork...
  FF
• To be grammatically correct, there does.
  Good looking pages by the way Martin
• A + I must say. Good work webmasters.
  Deleerious D