Not on BM they won't.

They will. Most visitors don't even look at the forum, let alone post on it. You lot are the vocal minority of legend

The redesign comes complete with a mostly-new back end, which you won't be able to see but which will make my job a lot easier, so I'm all for it...

Mike Davis wrote (see)

Most visitors don't even look at the forum, let alone post on it. You lot are the vocal minority of legend

So BM isn't a forum then?  There's more?  Wow you learn something new each day

I saw it by mistake. Lots of stuff about bikes, not really relevant to Mindless Drivel. Not entirely sure why it's there tbh.

Gav. wrote (see)

I saw it by mistake. Lots of stuff about bikes, not really relevant to Mindless Drivel. Not entirely sure why it's there tbh.

You can try whacky colours out on the roadie crowd and they will lap it up. Have you seek some of the kit they ride in???

There were some very disturbing colour combinations on a road ride I did recently. 48 hours later my eyeballs were still aching!

Whilst the content looks OK, the forum is terrible and WAY too white/bright.

The speech bubble looks like something a 5 year old would design.

I wonder if they are familar with Jakob Nielsen - I suspect not.

Mmm, lovely: http://www.useit.com/.

Usability and visual design are not the same thing, as useit.com amply demonstrates

Never said he was going to win awards for design Mike - but if I had a slow connection, I know what webpage I'd rather try to load.

Whilst his design is appalling, some of the points that many 'designers' fail to take into account, are amount of content on page / manoeuvrability around website / colour + animation overload.  There are numerous more, if you wish to read the articles in his link.

I was taught years ago - from a coding rather than design background admittingly - that if your Gran can't find her way around a site, it's too complicated. A simplified mentality, but my lecturers point is still valid though.

Website designers work on the assumption that we are all super literate web wizards and try to impress/out do their man bag wearing, fixie/ss riding, media whore colleagues.

It doesn't work like that in the real world. No-one gives a flying one about your latest fancy graphical addition if pages are slow to load and it's confusing/irritating to find the information you want. 

I personally have found the Magalica sites in their present incarnations to be relatively trouble free (noisy adverts aside) let's hope they keep it that way.

I don't need to read any more Neilsen, I'm reasonably familiar with his work. There's one of his books only just out of reach

One of the goals of the redesign here is to straighten out a lot of the cruft that's accumulated over the years and simplify various other things. Whatever we do with colours and stuff, some people will hate it, but hopefully actually using it will be betterer.

Probably not, but there will be some flashy new style sheets.

Just to be able to search by forum section would a bonus, and surely not that difficult to implement. Not sexy though, coding searching. Also can't be done through Dreamweaver either. 

Gav. wrote (see)

Also can't be done through Dreamweaver either. 

Gav. wrote (see)

Just to be able to search by forum section would a bonus, and surely not that difficult to implement. Not sexy though, coding searching. Also can't be done through Dreamweaver either.

Gav, bit of a well-hidden fact but you can add category:[categoryname] to a search query to restrict it to a specific forum section

and author:[member nickname]

eg "etape category: MTB author:gav." will search for the keyword 'etape' in the forum folder 'MTB' in threads started by 'Gav.'.

Breakdowns into category etc are shown alongside the  search results for articles and products; I think there may have been a tech reason why it wasn't so easily done for forum search. I'll find out

Thanks Sean; but without appearing to a head nipper, why is it hidden ?

It's like the ebay one - unless it's been recently documented on the site, it can be very powerful along the lines of

"whyte (bike,bicycle,mtb) -mackay"

so all 3 bracketed whyte variations are included, but anything with mackay is removed.

Only found out that by chance years ago, and I don't know of anyone who uses the facility in such a manner - probably because they don't realise you can do this.

Gav: I suspect we thought that against all historical precedent we'd very quickly add something better than cunning search strings, but it remains on the 'must-do' list.

Just talking with tech, the filters you can use in forum search strings are actually:

forum: [name of forum section, eg MTB]
author: [nickname of person who started thread]
thread: [phrase in thread title]
description: [phrase in thread subtitle]

plus AND, NOT, and OR

Time to add at least an 'advanced search' link which explains all this.. esp as the options vary according to the type of content you're looking for