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Template feedback

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Template feedback
Hi Alex,

You asked in the annoucement about the templates so here we go.

Firstly, this is meant to be constructive cricitism. I have not bought gossamer mail yet but am looking for an email provider. There are lots of email programs out there of varying quality so getting it right is important.

ok.

Firstly, i know you are proud of getting the templates to work on a text browser. This is quite an achievement but for me is useless. None of my users will use a text based browser at all and my site (as are most) is not geered towards them at all. Sorry to be frank about this but i hope trying to get the templates to work on this format has not affected decisions to much because well i think i explained it.

Thoughts:

1) The grey table borders are ugly as. Is it a border with cell paddding 1 or something. Anyway, i just think it looks very bad.
2) Tables top right, what is with that, borders for a one line and border round the logo. huh?
3) Table width, i log in and the first email i see (the welcome 1 cool feature by the way) is onto two lines for some reason, the table is not expanding for some reason?
4) text is too small in comparison to the buttons. Either size 2 text or css form buttons are needed
5) The grey for the header of the email is well ugly. Black on that grey dosen't work.
6) Boring links. The "print" "add to address book" are badly and boringly arranged, just a random table i think, even right aligning them would look better
7) Lack of links at bottom of email - "where do i go now syndrome"
8) variable fonts. We appear to have numerous fonts over the place, from time to aria to i think i saw a bit of verdana but not sure
9) Complete lack of bold for anything - emphasis perhaps in some places
10) images. I think some nicely designed navigation images would be a much better plan.
11) Address book - why form tags?

In conclusion. The templates are just amazingly boring. Yes they are fast loading and a times that is important (especially for email) but people do expect more and for a lot of people what it looks like is important. There are so many free email people out there, taking a leaf out of their books would not have been hard. Hotmail is what people are used to and there is a lot more colourful/graphic intense.

So fast loading is good but it is not everything. This templates apparently have only gone for one thing. Having two sets would not be impossible.

Before i get shouted at and told "you can change them...." yes i am fully aware of that however when you pay this much for something part of the idea is it is easy to use and install. If i bought the software i know i would have to spend the best part of 2 or 3 days making templates for it, and it is this that puts me of buying the software far far more than the price. The same issue is with links and i know how long it is taking me to get it ready.

In conclusion, a brilliant feature set (multi domains just rules) but the templates suck

this is all my opinion, i have attempted constructive crictism so no flaming!

http://www.ASciFi.com/ - The Science Fiction Portal
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Re: Template feedback In reply to
and i just found the "grey theme" do you really want comments on this ?

http://www.ASciFi.com/ - The Science Fiction Portal
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Re: Template feedback In reply to
In Reply To:
i have attempted constructive crictism so no flaming
Whilst you may be providing constructive criticism, I think you went about your post the wrong way.

I think you have been a little harsh. I thought the purpose of the templates was to make them useable and fairly simple so they can be customized to your particular taste. So Alex was not trying to create a masterpiece as he knew that people would want to customize them anyway (which you can do easily in the templates). I have a feeling you would be complaining even more if the templates were so complexed and well designed that they could not be customized easily.

Alex is a perl programmer not a website designer (although he's not to bad with his javascript :))

Just my opinion....

Paul
Installations:http://wiredon.net/gt/
Support: http://wiredon.net/forum/

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Re: Template feedback In reply to
well it was meant to be relativly harsh, i think it is a major problem with the system and is 1 of the main reasons why i will hold out on buying it.

Alex dosen't have to do the templates ;) they have 10 employees, perhaps getting 1 whose job is to do just the html (and images of which there are none!) would be a good plan.

there is nothing "wrong" with the current templates and a low thrills, low bandwidth set is very nice to have but it could be an option with a "thrills" version as well.

In the end, i see email as sometihng i just add on to my site. If people want to use it they use it. I wouldn;t want to spend ages trying to make it look exactly like the rest of my site, i would want to change a couple of colours, add a header and footer and be done with it. This is what i could do with imageFolio.cgi something i recently bought, (see at www.ascifi.com/cgi-bin/gallery/imageFolio.cgi ) it took about an hour to get it installed and ready to work and i can leave it. There are a few things i might change but it works in an hour, there is no way i could say this for the the mail system.

and on the wrong way of doing it, Alex specifically asked for feedback on the templates, i think i was very polite really pointing out what i liked about the programm repeatidly saying what is good about the current set of templates and offering what i think is constructive criticism. If you disagree with my conclusion that is fine but i don't think i went about it the wrong way. I knew i would immediatly get a response akin to this when i posted the message which is why i tried preempt it.

http://www.ASciFi.com/ - The Science Fiction Portal
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Re: Template feedback In reply to
I didn't mean you were rude or that what you said wasn't true, I just meant......oh nevermind.

In Reply To:
I wouldn't want to spend ages trying to make it look exactly like the rest of my site, i would want to change a couple of colours, add a header and footer and be done with it.
But isn't that contradicting the point you were making?

Paul
Installations:http://wiredon.net/gt/
Support: http://wiredon.net/forum/

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Re: Template feedback In reply to
ok.. don't worry, you just get the feeling here sometimes that the moment you post everyone lines up to have a go :)

what i really want is something that looks nice that i can add to my site easily. When i say i just want to change a few colours and add header/footer that is because i expect it to look good already and then just add it in to my site.

http://www.ASciFi.com/ - The Science Fiction Portal
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Re: Template feedback In reply to
Just out of curiosity, how difficult would it be to add a formatting toolbar in the new msg window? While in html mode, have a small toolbar that can allow a user to quickly use different fonts, bold, italics, colors, etc......

I've seen several other programs that incorporate this into their scripts, but also run a little higher in price....but works great. I think it would help with the aesthetics as well..(I'm getting a bit overloaded on the graphic designs right now....)

Great job with the script though!


Perl Hopefull
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Re: Template feedback In reply to
yes that would be useful. Something like i have on my forum posts and new threads windows, www.ascifi.com/forums/index.php

http://www.ASciFi.com/ - The Science Fiction Portal
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Re: Template feedback In reply to
Really easy...all you have to do is create another TABLE called USER PREFERENCES....

This would be a 1->M connection between the USERS table and USER_PREFERENCES table...

Example:

Users_Preference

USERID
FONT_STYLE1
FONT_STYLE2
FONT_STYLE3
COLOR1
COLOR2
COLOR3
COLOR4

Then you would create a plug-in to query the USER_PREFERENCE table based on the UserID.

Regards,

Eliot Lee
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Re: Template feedback In reply to
Hi,

Thanks for the feedback, it is definately helpful.

What I'm most interested is the "larger" comments, not font size and bolding (although spelling and other glitches are very useful). So far I have had mixed reaction to the templates, some people love the fast loading, others prefer something with images and a little more "exciting". The consensus seems to be anti frames though, so I'm considering not bothering with bringing the version 1 template set over. Any comments on this?

As for the text version, it was actually just a side-effect of the design and not something we planned from in the beginning. We noticed it after the templates had been created and thought it useful enough to mention.

Yes I know the grey theme is hideous. I'm still not sure what to do with the Themes. The second theme is not meant to be attractive, it was just showing that you can set user options like color, font, that affect the entire site, but are set per user. You could just as well replace that with "Large Text" theme "High Contrast" theme. We haven't yet done anything with that.

That said, we do have a designer working on a new set right now, and the final version will ship with three templates, the ones you see here, a non frames set with images and a different look and feel, and a wap set for cell phones.

Thanks again for the feedback, and I'd love to hear from anyone else on this as it is an important part of the program (perhaps the most important part).

Cheers,

Alex

--
Gossamer Threads Inc.
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Re: Template feedback In reply to
thanks Alex, that is the response i hoped for :)

- frames - ek, i would much prefere not to have them, they offer very limited advantage but lots of disadvantages.
- wap: now that is very useful.

looking forward to seeing the more graphical intense images etc one.

cheers.

http://www.ASciFi.com/ - The Science Fiction Portal
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Re: Template feedback In reply to
I aslo agree that there is no need for frame-version.

In the graphic version, would you use text in english language, or use icons ? Icons would be best for mulit-language, I think...

In most pages, you have set width=500 in the main content tables (like when showing welcome message, and when seeing the inbox.) Is it possible to set this to like 100% in admin, so itīs more easily adopteble to sites using header.htm? I have tables in header.php that has already set the width, and if it where 100% in the hardcoded, it would save much time. This is on two places (two tables)<table border=1 cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 width=500>

However, in your demo its best with 500, but if it where a global value I could or something it would be nice...

I like the "simple" template.

Are

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Re: Template feedback In reply to
Yes I don't know how easy or hard it would be, but it would be nice to change table sizes and fonts to tags like <%width%> and <%font%> and then in the admin area, the webmaster can define the value and it would update all templates. That would be cool.

Am I just being too fussy?

Paul
Installations:http://wiredon.net/gt/
Support: http://wiredon.net/forum/

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Re: Template feedback In reply to
Wouldn't that add extra load to the server? The more <%tags%> there are the more processing before the page can be sent to the browser. Much better to use CSS for these formatting options. This would be easier for those users using WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver. I'd advise against putting in a load of formatting tags by default, I for one would just want to strip them out straight away. You can create your own custom tags anyway from admin if you really wanted to do this.

Regards
Jason

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Re: Template feedback In reply to
The reason I mentioned it, was because it would be practical for many sites that do not use the same width as GT demo does. (and I would save some work :-))

Of course, you can customize this yourselves without setting any values in admin, that would be major overkill to do this in admin for a single install.