Old School & Dated – But We Still Took Gold!
8 Comments February 3, 2008 / Posted in Web StuffGood news of the week came from Web User who in their latest issue (180, 31st January – 13th February) put Loquax as their gold award winner in a double page feature about competitions. The award is made all the more sweeter as the last time they did a similar feature they didn’t even mention us – so yes we’re all quite pleased with this result and it’s a fantastic early 10th birthday present.
The review of the site is actually pretty good and it’s nice to our site navigation, something that we’ve worked on, be described as “pleasently effortless”! On the whole the review is positive, but they did pick up on the overall look of the site, describing it as “somewhat dated”.
Make Way For The Old School!
Ever the perfectionist, and much to Jude’s amusement that despite being the top site in the whole review, the “dated” comment is something I’ve been pondering over the weekend. In a chat with another affiliate he said we did look “old school” and to take a look at some Web 2.0 type sites for inspiration or consider a Sitepoint web design contest for ideas to perhaps drag Loquax into 2008.
We’re more inclined to make any changes “in-house” though – basically because the site is “logo – banner – left hand navigation – middle content – right hand side – footer”, and as we know what we want and why, it’s easier to do it ourselves.
It’s an old school approach, but getting someone else to do things for us is like asking a stranger to choose your underpants!
But being “old school” doesn’t mean we’re not “down with the kids”! Loquax contains AJAX functionality with our own inhouse developed tracker and we’re working on other bits and bobs – just for fun. Ongoing fine tuning and making the site better for users is paramount and whilst it’d be nice to look stylish and glossy, it can’t come at the expense of content quality.
Perhaps one day soon we’ll have a nice and shiny more updated look… for now though (but not too long) we’ll celebrate that our old school ways have gotten us gold!
Nice One – Congratulations Jason and Jude
Great achievement well done
Well done guys, I say keep the site as it is. If it is not broke don’t fix it. I am not convinced a glossy web 2.0 front end will end anything to the users experience. You have a huge following and sometimes a big change could lose you lots of people who are used to the “old school dated ways”
That said I think I am too old school myself interesting to hear what others think keep old school or go web2.0
Nice one, congratulations
Well done guys
nice one!
Nice one Jason and Jude, old skool rulez
Congratulations guys. As you say the functionality does what you want, so there’s no need to change anything.
Well done all. Nice to see that function still rules over form in some people’s eyes.