EatAroundOKC launches new design

by Tim | March 16, 2008 | 1 Comment

Please allow me to deviate from the regular flow of reviews to make a quick announcement. Today, we launched a new design on EatAroundOKC.com. I’ve been working on this design for what seems like four or five months. Since my “spare time” is all I have to contribute, the process is slow going. But alas, it is ready. Let me point out a few new features.

Real Estate

The main motivation behind the new design was to increase the viewing space. Since more than 90% of our visitors are sporting screen resolutions of 1024 or higher, I felt it was time to put away the old 800px width design and go with something a bit more roomy.

Readability

The next most important factor was improving readability. The old site had a pretty small font-size whereas the new design provides a very generous 15px body font that I think makes things much easier to read.

More features

A new, three-column layout gives us the ability to locate the category navigation on the left, freeing up the right sidebar for some new features.

First, you’ll notice a “highest rated” section. This area shows the top five highest rated restaurants based on our ajax-style star rating system that allows everyone to cast their vote. This new feature makes the rating system all the more important and I hope that each of you will rate the restaurants you’ve been to. The more votes we get, the more accurate our “highest rated” list will be.

Second, you’ll see a “popular articles” section. This section shows the top ten most popular articles based on a weighting of various factors including the number of comments, number of pageviews, and a few more things that we’re tracking. This list will give you an idea of what articles the most people are visiting.

As always, thank you!

It’s fun to build a new design, but it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun if no one were going to look at it. Over recent months, our readership has grown tremendously and we are so grateful for that. Let me just say thanks for reading, commenting, and interacting with us. We very much enjoy bringing reviews to you and hope you’ll stay with us. There’s much more to come!

This article was posted by Tim Wall on Sunday, March 16th, 2008. It is filed in News / Misc. Please leave your comments below (we'd love to hear from you), or trackback from your own site.

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  • CGHill says:
    March 18th, 2008 at 7:34 pm   

    Looks good. The previous design wasn’t bad, but this one is a bit easier for these old eyes to read. (Of course, I am constantly twiddling Firefox’s text-size thingamajig as I surf.)

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