Some of you may have noticed some changes in the overall site design here at Joomlabamboo, and while I have a few incomplete mockups for a total reconstruction laying around for the site, I've decided to give the site a little spruce up rather than a total reconstruction. It's more of a realignment rather than a redesign with just some minor tweaks to the colour scheme and general layout but I thought it worth acquainting you with the changes. I think the end result is a much sharper and crisper site design, which will hopefully translate into better usability.

Some of the changes aren't 100% locked in or confirmed and the quicklinks panel needs a little fleshing out but these things can wait until after we release the Newstream Joomla template in a matter of a week or two. So if you are keen to see whats new then check out the info after the break.

A new tone of green.

One of the hard things for me is settling on a tone of green that Im happy with. Im naturally drawn to either deep blues or rich reds and so using the colour green can be challenging and contrary to the palette that I'm naturally drawn to. I guess that serves me right for choosing 'bamboo' in the business name :) Who knows a future iteration might use a revolutionary non green colour scheme.

The old green.

The new green.

Here are some snapshots of the other changes to the site.

Frontpage layout changes.

One of the big differences is that I've swapped out the slideshow on the front page and created a more useful microblog driven grid of the latest templates. I think this places the latest themes up front where they belong and hopefully means less scrolling to see what the latest theme is.

More definition for the navigation area.

I was never really happy with the sub menu items on the site and I think its much better now - not perfect but certainly better.

New member login hidden panel

This is the first stage of splitting up the login area from the quicklinks panel. The next stage is to add a more menu item to the main menu and then drop all of the quicklink menu items in there. The login tab at the top certainly makes it more evident that thats where you need to login.

New Plans page

Twitter Icon

Twitter is proving to be a pretty crucial way for us to communicate whats new on the site and so the twitter icon that takes you to our twitter page is a lot more prominent now. Its not 100% just yet now and I'm still playing with its position so it may well have moved by the time you read this. You can follow joomlabamboo on twitter here.

New tabbed interface for the main documentation page

While the design for this page hasn't been locked down the functionality is vastly improved. Ill be adding more tutorials and centralising the documentation around this page so stay tuned for some more updates -and keep it bookmarked.

As always Im keen to hear constructive feedback from your point of view. Feel free to leave it here or on the forum in the site suggestion forum. Ive got a few more changes in mind to help make things a little easier on the site and Im also looking forward to the release of the Ninjaboard forum component so I can get my hand dirty with the forum theme - that's long overdue for some tender love and care.

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