Oh, what the heck, eh?

Apropos of what I said before, I’ve decided to bump up the testing weekend a bit, and have made a couple of changes to the plan since yesterday afternoon.

For starters, the ‘Milano’ theme is out. I’ve gone with the ‘Perogato’ theme (from the same designer) instead, with a few custom modifications (including a sexy new logo, if I do say so myself). I’ve dropped the ‘:’ from the site name as well…it’s a minor thing.

Additionally, since I actually like this theme, there’s a decent chance that it will stay in place. I have to make a few modifications to it still (e.g. adding tag support and forum discussion links), but those are minor cosmetic changes. This theme has most of what else I was hoping to end up with: a more modern feel, a featured content pane so I can highlight stories that I think are important, more and better use of jQuery and inline images, and dropdown menus for quicker access to the things that keep many of you coming back to the site: Ultima remakes, patches, and utilities.

May I draw attention to the double menu bar at the top of the site? The red bar, the good reader will note, lists what are considered, by this site at least, to be the main canonical entries in the Ultima series, from Akalabeth through to Ultima 9, including both Underworld titles. Obviously, not every remake, patch, and utility is listed, and so the complete list of categories still appears on the sidebar, but this way there will at least serve to get a goodly number of site visitors to the content they want a) more quickly, and b) without even the need to scroll down the main page.

The main page of the site will also boast more articles under this template.

Anyhow, please leave feedback in the comments form of this article, or in the related forum thread. I want to hear what everyone thinks about this redesign. And as I mentioned, this design is one I like more, but is not yet at the point where it will be an unchangeable thing; if a goodly number of people who leave comments say “I hate it!”, I’ll put the ‘Aspire’ theme back first thing on Tuesday morning, without the slightest hesitation.

In Edmonton, the coming weekend is a long weekend, which means I will be offline (or, at least, away from the site) until Tuesday. As such, I will be using that time to test a new template for the site that I’ve slowly been polishing up. Come Friday afternoon, Aiera will look quite a bit different.

Now, let me reiterate that this is only going to be a test. I will be deploying a new template (‘Milano’, by this guy) in place of the current one (‘Aspire’, by these guys); no site content will be changed or removed. And come Tuesday (or possibly late Monday) I’ll put the ‘Aspire’ theme back in place while I review comments that I hope — and I’m stating this now to get your attention — visitors will leave.

Truth be told, I’m not 100% satisfied with the ‘Millano’ theme, though it has a few nice features (such as a jQuery-driven rotating featured content pane, dropdown menus, and other stuff) that are the primary focus of my test. ‘Milano’ likely won’t be the actual new theme I select for Aiera, but I want to see how people react to different interface elements that the new theme, whatever it ends up looking like, will probably feature.

So come back on Friday, or Saturday, or Sunday, and leave your thoughts!