Idealog magazine

Quote from: chinesedream at Oct 23, 2007, 07:39 PM

I see the bottom section’s contents are the same on each page. I guess your site hasn’t completed yet (?)

Layout for magzine and newspaper is a great challenge, it really test one’s skill on grid layout design. I wish one day I will get an opportunity to do a site like this.

Thanks! Actually, the page footer is supposed to be the same on every page -- those are the ’departments’ of the magazine -- but obviously that’s confusing. An earlier mockup had the footer as light-on-dark, and maybe we should go back to something like that so it’s more clearly different.

You’re right about the challenge of magazines & newspapers. It’s so difficult to mix up different content without it becoming a complete morass (I think our designer has done an amazing job). We want to start putting up a lot more rich media which is only going to make it harder ... wish us luck!

Cheers
Matt

Thats one of the cleanest and neatest looking sites I have seen in a long while. It has a ’fresh’ look. Good work.

Quote from: tuatara at Oct 15, 2007, 04:53 PM

We’ve been working on this for the past few months, between print deadlines ;-). Rolled out early this morning, local time ...

http://idealog.co.nz/

Idealog is a New Zealand business magazine about ideas, innovation and creativity. The original site was created two years ago with Joomla -- we had a list of requirements that pretty much only Joomla met, and as Mambo had won the previous open-source award I thought it was a pretty safe choice. Not so! Joomla is full of archaic, unexpected behaviours, the quality of the plugins is generally very poor and it’s very difficult to control your layout. It got us started quickly, but I won’t miss it.

MODx, on the other hand, still has a few rough edges, but it’s a powerful and rewarding piece of kit. Now we have a base site that we can really build on. Thanks to the core team and to this very helpful and clued-up community. We had quite a bit of content in Joomla and writing a script to migrate it all to MODx was a pain, but worth it I reckon.

Thoughts on the site are welcome ...

Cheers
Matt

Kudos on the site. I am seeking sites from other magazine or newspaper publishers that are created with Modx. A big plus is they have social networking elements.

It’s a beautifully designed site.

There is some flickering of the rotating image and a flickering hourglass cursor in IE6.

You might be able to prevent it by uncommenting these lines at the end of the MODx .htaccess file:

#ExpiresActive On
#ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000
#ExpiresByType image/jpeg A2592000
#ExpiresByType image/png A2592000
#BrowserMatch "MSIE" brokenvary=1
#BrowserMatch "Mozilla/4.[0-9]{2}" brokenvary=1
#BrowserMatch "Opera" !brokenvary
#SetEnvIf brokenvary 1 force-no-vary

Bob

Quote from: BobRay at Dec 15, 2007, 02:26 AM

There is some flickering of the rotating image and a flickering hourglass cursor in IE6.

Thanks for the heads-up. I’ve uncommented those lines, but as I’m nowhere near a copy of IE6 I have no idea if it helps ...

Cheers
Matt

Nice visual design. Clean look, nice graphic elements. Fits on a 15.4" WS notebook monitor (1280X800).

One of the minor things that I noticed is based on an article I read this week discussing the logic of migrating print media formats to the web (scroll down to the "How Deep is My Silo"). I don’t know enough about the user testing results to know if it is wholly valid but it may be something to think about.

I am glad to see that a higer profile site is using MODx in pre 1.0.

Great work.

All the best,

Jay

The site is great. I couldn’t look away until I finished reading which is a sign of a well designed layout and content. It far exceeds the sites I’ve build to date so my jealousy factor is up! I’ve still got lots to learn...

Quote from: tuatara at Dec 15, 2007, 03:36 AM

Quote from: BobRay at Dec 15, 2007, 02:26 AM

There is some flickering of the rotating image and a flickering hourglass cursor in IE6.

Thanks for the heads-up. I’ve uncommented those lines, but as I’m nowhere near a copy of IE6 I have no idea if it helps ...

Cheers
Matt

I’m sorry to say there’s no difference. The flickering only occurs when the big image at the is changing. The new image flickers slightly as it’s filling in and, at the same time, you see a rapidly flickering hourglass cursor.

It’s not all that bad and it will just encourage people to upgrade to IE7 so I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. I suppose you could preload the image in javascript and display it all at once but the fade-in is a nice effect.

Bob