Changes at Help Developer

As Help Developer is getting more and more popular I felt that I needed to clean a few things up and make it nicer looking. So you may notice some changes around here, I would like to hear your opinions on the new tweaks so please leave them as comments.

Continues below...

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New menu

The previous Help Developer wasn’t really that nice, and after writing a post the other day about 2 line menus, I thought why not integrate one into the site, so I have done and I think it makes the menu area a lot nicer. I have also moved some things around in the header area and added an advertisement bar (gotta make some money for all the hard work I put into HD after all ) I think altogether the header area is a lot more cleaner looking and professional.

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New Logo

I have designed a simplified logo without the paint pallete icon, I think the new one suits the new design as a sleek simple logo using the Qlassik Bold Font.

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Community Links

I used to have a Best of The Web feature in the sidebar, however this didn’t allow you to add your links to the list so visitors couldn’t really benefit from it unless I found their content. However, thanks to this great tutorial from NetTuts, I have successfully integrated a community links area on the sidebar that you can add your articles to.

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Bolder Links

One of the problems with the previous design was that the link colour was the same as the text colour so until you hovered over the link you didn’t know that it was a link. In this revision of the design, that has changed. Links are now bold red so that they can be seen easily. I have also made the “read the rest of this post” link on the homepage stand out more.

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Cleaned up sidebar and footer

The sidebar and footer used to be quite cluttered before but now I have moved the tabs to the footer of the site and the sidebar and footer are now much cleaner and nicer to look at.

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Nicer looking comments area

The old comments area wasn’t too great, however the new one is much cleaner and easier to use, and gives a direct link in the bottom left to the authors website so that if you like the authors comment then you can easily see his/her website, this is also an incentive to post comments.

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Less Posts on the Homepage

On slower computers I have noticed that the homepage takes a while to load, this is because it is querying about 50 posts adding them in that list under the extracts of the top 4 posts. I have cut down the list so that only around 20 are shown. I have also added the number of comments to the right of each link.

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More work to come

I am going to be adding more and more enhancements to Help Developer over the coming weeks so if you notice problems then they may be due to the updating. Thank you and I look forward to your comments.