Welcome to the new Fstoppers.com. We still are working out a few glitches here and there but almost everything is working perfectly now. We put a lot of thought into the new update and we decided to keep the layout the exact same and simply add some helpful features. The update was done by the incredibly talented team at Novum Studios.
The Layout
We didn't want to change the way that you use Fstoppers.com so we left the layout of the exact same. You can still easily watch videos all from the home page and we didn't move any buttons around. We did change the colors and the fonts but the website should still "feel" the same to all of you long time users.
Top Posts
We know that many of our readers visit Fstoppers multiple times a day and watch every video we post. Others may only come a couple times a month and they only have time to watch 1 or 2 videos a week. For these readers we created 4 links at the top of our home page to the most popular videos on our site. If you are looking for the best videos on our site, now you can easily find them.
Ratings
Now it is up to you to help rate the videos that we post. If you hate it, give it a 1 star, if you love it give it 5 (or anything in between). These ratings will help others decide whether or not it is worth their time to watch. Your ratings will also help us learn which posts you like and which you don't. Please try your best to rate every video you watch so that our ratings are accurate.
Comments
The new comment system is probably our biggest upgrade. Now you can either create an account with Disqus or you can simply comment using your Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo, or Open ID account. It is now possible to easily "like" other comments and respond to them. You can also easily add media to your comments like pictures and videos.
Categories
Over the next few years we are going to have a massive library of helpful BTSVs. We wanted there to be an easier way for you to find all of these videos and so Patrick and I went back through every single post and put them into very specific categories. You will notice that on our right sidebar you can easily click on the most popular categories, or click to "expand" the list and see them all.
Who Did It
If you need any web/design work done I honestly cannot recommended Novum Studios enough. We get people all the time who claim to know exactly what they are doing but when it comes time to produce quality work, they can't. Case Sandberg and his team at Novum not only did an incredible job, they did it in about 7 days. For the next month they are giving 20% off to all FS readers so give them some business.
Tell Us What You Think
We put a lot of thought into updating Fstoppers so that it is easier to navigate for new readers and still very familiar for our long time readers. Please help us work the bugs out by telling us what you think in the comments below. If you see any glitches please let us know and we will try to fix them ASAP.
We have found that older versions of IE and Firefox are not loading our top flash bar and it isn't showing up as a jpg on iphones and ipads like it used to. We are working on that. We are also working on the "extras" button at the top. If you see any other problems please let us know.
Ok guys we just put all of the fonts back exactly how they were before. We aim to please :)
Lee tell the forum I'm not crazy? There was a serif font on the nav buttons last night....Right?
Your not, the original CSS was calling for the font Lucida Grande which comes preinstalled on Macs but not Windows. The was a bug that displayed Times if Lucida Grande was not found. It was fixed earlier today!
It's not loading on Chrome for mac either.
Any luck now? We are both on Windows and it looks close to perfect on Chrome/IE9/Firefox4
Novum Studios are on Macs and PC so I'm hoping the Apple side is covered on their end.
Works now.
Please guys, use smaller font in menu bar:) Love Fstoppers.com more and more fstoppers original.
Love it when a redesign is kept very SIMPLE!
Love Fstoppers!
it looks stupid! make everything smaller and faster to navigate.
Using bigger fonts from the previous design makes the blog looks like it is missing the CSS part. When I saw the new design today I thought something is happening with my browser and it is not loading the CSS :).
Anyway, it is nice keeping the same structure so all the users are still familiar with it.
And please guys, I know it is time consuming and you have to generate funds on first place but give us so more FSTOPPERS ORIGINALS. Since first time I watched one of them you grab my interest of doing video but not still photos only.
Cheers!
Using bigger fonts from the previous design makes the blog looks like it is missing the CSS part. When I saw the new design today I thought something is happening with my browser and it is not loading the CSS :).
Anyway, it is nice keeping the same structure so all the users are still familiar with it.
And please guys, I know it is time consuming and you have to generate funds on first place but give us so more FSTOPPERS ORIGINALS. Since first time I watched one of them you grab my interest of doing video but not still photos only.
Cheers!
It does look like I have zoomed in on my browser. I think most people agree, smaller fonts is better.
I like everything about the redesign apart from the fonts... and there is no need for that top image scroller to be flash at all
More color. It's so bland looking now. It reminds me of a forum more than a blog. I also agree with the smaller font :D
Took some work to redesign though. I hope you all get it worked out..
More color. It's so bland looking now. It reminds me of a forum more than a blog. I also agree with the smaller font :D
Took some work to redesign though. I hope you all get it worked out..
Your favicon seems to have disappeared. Thought you should know.
Your favicon seems to have disappeared. Thought you should know.
Thanks everyone for the comments. I will talk with our designer about the size of the font although I think this is a standard font and a standard size (check any of the other top 100 websites in the world).
For those who are saying its so "plain" I don't quite understand because it was so much more plain than this before the update. Our goal was to keep the site itself simple and classic looking so that the content would jump off. Websites that have a really unique "look" go out of style very quickly and we don't want to constantly have to change the look of the site.
Ehmm.. where did the css go?
seriously it feels like im reading a newspaper right now ;-) sans serif was fine.
i love the simplification aspect, just change the fonts please :)
Nice good stuff guys... always good to see a fresh design, I need some time to get used to it though I'm gonna miss the old design lol. my ad-blocker is blocking 100% of your ads now including the top banner which isn't fun cuz I like photography related ads so I'll have to disable it here
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Love the redesign except for the choice of font for your top nav. I also don't like how you're using two completely different font styles (serif and sans-serif) around the site. The look of the site is clean if I imagined it without the font style choices.
Also, let you friends at Novum know that it's hard to want to hire a team to do your website if their own personal site is incomplete. I'm sure they've been told this before though :)
Looks good, But there is one thing I don't get. Why do you guys uses a different URL for the forums? Why not forums.fstoppers.com or fstoppers.com/forums ? Not that big of a deal, but it just kinda bugs me. I think it would look nice doing it one of the other ways.
we put the forum on a different server so that one site cannot effect the other
You could still link the forum server to forum.fstoppers.com. On the DNS manager for the domain hosting fstoppers.com you create a new "A" host named "Forum" (or what ever you want) and use the IP that's used for the fstoppersforum.com domain, You can still have fstoppersforum.com for people that are use to getting to the forum from there. Or you could forward it to the new domain.
You did not change the layout.
I guess you learned from Jalopnik, Digg and others.
Wise... Very wise guys.
Congrats.
So Many people bring up Gawker but the reality is they changed the site tremendously and their CEO isn't budging on complaints. Facebook used to update the site every 9 months and people would start groups complaining but now they are the number #2 most visited and used site in the world. I really find it shocking when people say they like the old design when the old design has no design at all...it was pretty wasteful in space and was never the design we wanted. Hearing some of the unwarranted complaints today has reminded me of the song Garden Party :)
I have to be honest guys, I'm not liking the redesign at all. This comes from a web developer.
Any particular issues? We left almost everything the exact same but we changed a few grey tones to other grey tones and then we put boxes around the posts and the titles... Now the fonts are back to exactly the same as they were before the update.
I really don't like the boxes, on the main page the "post categories" look like a mess and I much preferred the old facebook links of the contributors.
The commenting system is way better though.
I've gotten a bit more used to it now but I feel like it made the site a bit less professional, sort of? When I saw it the first time I thought it was an april fool's joke in which you were mocking the Gawker blogs redesign from a few weeks ago. I guess it feels a bit jumpy and in the way of the videos.
It ressembles more a standard blog than as video blog. The previous design was more focused on the videos, whether intentionally or not.
It's funny you say that because we wanted a clean and bright look that is very typical of the most popular blogs in the world (google, facebook, engadget, apple, etc).
The problem with the old blog, whether you realized it or not, was there was a lot of design elements that made no sense or looked bad. Text categories all over the place, dates, email to a friend, link to this post, and lots and lots of dead gray space between posts, ads, and comments. If anything I thought it looked really unprofessional and sort of half-assed.
I think a big problem with the old design was it was primarily dark grey and now it's light grey or white. Maybe we will post and old image of the blog in a few months; when I look at a screen capture on my computer now it looks so horrible.
I am 50/50 right now with how I feel about the overall design. There are some things that seem more like a distraction though than useful. Like there are drop shadows on the outer boxes of most of the content blocks. Keep them to 1px or just don't put them in at all. They don't really serve a purpose. The block with the "tweet" and "share" buttons might be better as a longer horizontal bar than floating to the left of the article block. I feel with it placed like that you will run into lots of weird formatting issues when it comes to making posts. These are just thoughts. :)
You are complaining about a single row of pixels? I think you forgot how bad our site used to look.
I suppose that is true. I wouldn't say complaining just overly constructively criticising. Honestly I could care less about the design of the site so much as the content on it. I figured you asked " what do you think" so I'm just putting it out there. :P
Really like the new design. Glad to see the vids are not auto playing when you hit the main page. Nice work all around.
Hatch
did it ever do that for you in the past? That would be really annoying!
yes...would load the main page and a few videos would play... wasn't horrible.. but.. it isn't doing that now and it's a good thing. :) Hatch
Sorry guys, you fail. Where's the branding? I don't see fstoppers logo anywhere.
Sorry guys, you fail. Where's the branding? I don't see fstoppers logo anywhere.
We didn't remove any logos from the previous design. We have the constant FS logo on the rotating banner which we are working on making non flash based. If you are on any of the 4 major desktop browsers it should be showing up.
Oh, it's not loading for me, probably because of Noscript or Adblock.
It's because of Adblock. It recognizes the banner as an ad and automatically blocks it on the new site. Same here.
I don't know if anyone else is having this problem, but it's been around as long as I've read Fstoppers.
The problem is that when you post a new video, they don't update, so instead of a whole new post I have an old video with new text. I always have to go and open the new post separately to get the new video also. Even refreshing the main site won't help here.
One probable cause for this is that I always have about 30 tabs open on my browser (Firefox) so I don't "open" the page every time. It's still odd, because this is the one and only site that does this.
I'm on Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard, Firefox 4.
I can't see the top banner at all, it just ends with the top menu.
This glitch should be fixed today
Seems to be fixed now actually
I'm on Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard, Firefox 4.
I can't see the top banner at all, it just ends with the top menu.
Whoops, double post.
now the font is okay and the website too. just one more little thing i would not use. this is the drop shadow of the title in new post.