the delphic expanse

Hello everyone!

As an experiment, I've made our new, feature-heavy skin - Expanse Plus the default for now.

Our old skin, Expanse, is still available.

Let me know what you like and don't like about the new skin!

www.thedelphicexpanse.com/archive

The new features seems to be nice. I always love a poll. Guess who I voted for. However, if I can make a comment: the white colour is so bright that it's hurting my eyes and the box with Search and Browse is placed over the logo of the ENT crew, so I am missing Phlox. Now, he isn't my favorite , but it would be nice if the logo was intact.

This skin seems to work better on desktops rather than laptops.

I might see if I can tweak it to make the white less bright as well.

In the meantime, you can always switch back to regular expanse!

It shouldn't be happening, but if you want to fix the problem with the banner running into the search box, you can just zoom out!

Honeybee wrote:It shouldn't be happening, but if you want to fix the problem with the banner running into the search box, you can just zoom out!

Ah! Banner was the word I was looking for (it's midnight here and I can't sleep). I tried zooming out, but the search box is glued to the banner. Try again tomorrow. Thanks for the tip!

Looks good, Honeybee!

A few things though.

The first is only minor. Is there anyway of spacing out the 'Recent' box? They look too squished up together to me. Hopefully that made sense???

And the other issue I found is in the actual chapters. Is there anyway of putting a separator between the Author's chapter notes and the actual story? Plus, I also noticed that the 'End Chapter Notes' has dropped of the page (not in the first chapter though). Of course, I've only checked one of my stories so I'm not sure if this is universal!!!

Anyways, thanks for all you hard work. It's greatly appreciated.

I'm checking it out on a laptop, and so far, so good as far as functionality. Love the additional features!

The design is mostly fluid - which means it'll resize the middle column on the page when you resize your browser window.

Unfortunately that doesn't work well with the banner at the top: unless your browser window is open to at least 1100 pixels wide some part of the banner will end up underneath the "search" or "browse by" area. For example, a browser window open full screen at 1024x768 screen resolution will still have Phlox stuck underneath the search box. I suspect the skin design was expecting a banner that was 200X620 and ours is 300X700 or thereabouts.

Good catch about the story notes box! I had to add a box on the original skin too. I'll see if I can do that ASAP.

Thanks, Entallat. We'll see about resizing the banner for better functionality!

I so appreciate all this feedback.

Does the skin let you chose the placement of the individual boxes or adjust the placement of column? It seems to me the design might work better if the first and third columns of the design were swapped.

IMO, the identity area (banner) of a web site should lead your eye down to primary action (login information) then on down to highlighted items (featured stories) and across to the body content (recent stories and news) before finally across to interactive stuff like polls and search and things like stats. This is nice, but it feels ... vaguely like a shirt on backwards.

I think I can do a swap - but I'll wait to resize the banner first!